It's a industry that deals in the cutting edge but still has medieval attitudes to work satisfaction and quality.The message is clear. go indie or hope to God you find a reasonable dev house to work for.

It really isn't a surprise why devs go into software development or CGI work, they pay better, respect you much better and the quality of life is 10x better. They say the average time someone spends in the industry is 3 years, I'm shocked it isn't lower.

Increasingly the buildings are becoming into hi-tech sweatshops, thank God we at least have decent employment law. I imagine chinese devs have a raw deal.

As a former video maker, producer and editor, the tv industry does have it's fair share of arseholes, but the majority of higher ups are friendly, understanding and the working hours are extremely good. The work itself is amazing with great experiences to be had.

I am moving towards game development, and for the life of me never going to even look at a dev house or publishers direction.

The whole game industry is mismanaged, but horrifyingly more concerned with what pizza to get then finishing the damn game.

It's common in Europe to have government support the game industry? WTF?

I can say from experience people who start in the industry during a crunch don't last much past 3 months though people who start at the very beginning tend to stay much longer it's that crunch that gets people
The UK is the only country with major game developers who don't give them tax incentives even the US does.

Ohhhh tax incentives. OK. I thought he meant that they were picking and choosing certain projects to support. That would be weird.

They're called tax breaks, we have them here in the US as well, in fact the Game Industry in the US gets to take its own tax breaks and some of the breaks intended for the movie industry as well. Yes, they're hogging two government tits at once.

I don't mind that, I just thought we were talking about direct payments for specific purposes.

Here in Norway, the government does grant money directly to game developers. About 2.5 million dollars for 2012.

I doubt anyone really cares, but I've just recently decided to start perusing indie game design (along with my two siblings) as a serious career, not just as a hobby. We've all three have spent out lives working on projects together, and recently we've decided that instead of arbitrarily going our separate ways, we'd try making money off that. It sounds like one of those stupid goals that kids make in elementary school--"I'm going to be a GAME DESIGNER!"--but we put a TON of effort into everything we do so breaking into the indie game market isn't completely unrealistic (if uncertain). Once I actually get some "real" programming languages under my belt, that is... (my only programming experience so far has been with Qbasic, Visual Basic, and GML... I've had some passing experience with C++, but not enough to be able to start coding a full game).

Best of luck to you (and your siblings)! It's a tough road as I am sure you know better than I.

Thanks

Honest advice here do not be discouraged if it feels like your throwing away more code each day than you are writting, second piece of advice have offsite backups and keep them up to date, third piece of advice and it sounds arsehole like... get a day job...