This, and also, if you just take a step back and think of the bigger picture, the work isn't valuable. There's a lot more value in pushing ads, a CRM, an email app, etc than keeping a 14 year old kid entertained.
I don't really buy the supply/demand argument everyone else is saying here. The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives. The amount of effort you'd need to put in to provide value to someone's life through a video game is way higher than the effort you'd need to put into a productivity tool.
In fact, more often than not, video games provide negative value to people's lives. They're usually a waste of time at best. And at worst, addictive and carpal tunnel inducing.
This is a crazy worldview to hold when looking at the annual revenue of just a single IP like Pokemon? Video games surpassed Hollywood years ago! If we want to measure value differently, I already treat certain games with the same reverence as literary classics, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.
Funny you mention Pokemon. Have you been to a Pokemon regional championships recently? Take a good look at the average Pokemon player. You really think that hobby is adding value to their life?
I've met people whose lives were almost destroyed due to games. This is true. I've also met those whose lives were transformed positively by it (no, not Pokemon.) They run the whole gamut.
I'll concede an email app doesn't produce that kind of wide-ranging effect on humans.
That is precisely my point, thank you. Yeah there's a few good ones like Undertale or (early 2010s era) Minecraft or Roblox or Garry's Mod but those are rare. Most of the games out there are the types like Pokemon which are more like a drug addiction.
So bringing this back to the "why don't game devs make boatloads of money like FAANG" it's because the vast majority of roles are being a scripter at Game Freak or Rockstar or whatever. I'm sure the engineers at Valve or Roblox or Epic Games are being treated very well because those companies actually provide value to people's lives.
Roblox to a lesser extent, but you get my point. I'd rather have my kid play Roblox where he might learn Lua scripting, than Pokemon which is just a complete dead end. Just look at what happened to Byuu and Hax. Or hell, even endrift with that weird unnecessary drama with Analogue. Many such cases. Not sure if you get those references. But the stories surrounding those people are why I stay far away from Nintendo stuff. And gaming in general.
> The end product just doesn't provide value to people's lives.
You're waaay too tuned in to the corporate ideology to be saying something like this. I suggest you zoom out. The top heavy games do make a ton of money, so evidently there's value in entertaining people and giving them some good playtime compared to the drudge that is corporate life (PS. in case you didn't know not all people love to work for some other guy's mission/vision).
Exactly. There is a lot of ignorance in this thread. As if the only two roles are engine programmer and gameplay programmer where gameplay is just scripting. Nope. We have engineering teams dedicated to: UI, physics, rendering, streaming, automation, gameplay (people who write gameplay features that the game designers will access via script), build infra, pipeline (and pipeline is split up into people doing lighting/geometry tools vs tools that package up data for efficient runtime use), level editing tools, asset editing tools. I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty. Then there are the QA teams, automation (not engineers but write test scripts etc), production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists (almost programmers), character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters. This is Activision but I know EA are similar and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that most AAA companies are also similar.
I never said they are low skill. They just don't have their priorities straight.
Those QA teams, automation people, production, level designers, vfx artists, tech artists, character artists, 2d artists, prop artists, gameplay scripters, etc are doing all that work just to put some pretty pixels on a 14 year old's screen. There's very little value there.
First off, adults play video games too. I think they’re actually the leading consumers, though I don’t care to look that up. Second, people like entertainment. Videogames are certainly no less important than movies, TV, or most novels. Entertainment can be important. Personally I find really hard videogames to be meditative and it’s bad for my mental health when I can’t get some time now and again to play some. I also made most of my adult friend group as a teen playing Halo together in a cabin multiple times per week.
I’m guessing you at least consume some sort of entertainment, so to say something like that is incredibly hypocritical.
Okay, sorry. I retract that. I responded to the original comment saying "this", which implies that I would have said that myself. So... you got me there.
As for the second part of your comment, well... yeah, I don't disagree with you there. That doesn't have any value either. Those people are probably not making that much money.
For those who want a GUI, LM Studio does this too (with llama.cpp as the backend I think). I'm getting great (albeit slow) results with Qwen3.6-35B MoE on 8GB GPU RAM, 40GB system RAM.
I made this exact same decisions (bun -> pnpm) for similar reasons, mostly bc I didn’t like how haphazardly a core part of the stack was being vibe coded. Too many changes too quickly for something that’s supposed to be stable
We were supposed to have AGI last summer. Obviously it is so smart that it has decided to pull a veil over our eyes and live amongst us undetected (this is a joke, if you feel your LLM is sentient, talk to a doctor)
What do you mean we were "supposed to have AGI last summer"?
People obviously have really strong opinions on AI and the hype around investments into these companies but it feels like this is giving people a pass on really low quality discourse.
This source [1] from this time last year says even lab leaders most bullish estimate was 2027.
But yes types are necessary for enterprise adoption. Even more important for agentic adoption.
reply