PyrZern, With so many artist wanting to work so bad and basically selling their work away for peanuts . I don't think putting my prices up online for anyone to see will do the industry any good. Artist will start looking at other people's price and lower them a little bit more to be competitive.... Then will all be working for peanuts in no time.
Not only that, a "freelance rate" isn't really a thing. Freelance rates are determined by complexity of asset, duration of contract (I might charge a client less if they can provide me with long term steady work), specific client/client requirements, type of work, all sorts of things. You can't give a simple number like a yearly wage because its significantly more complex than that.
Even if you knew the day/hourly rate of every freelance artist out there, you don't know how long they are spending per asset so that number is still meaningless.
Say you have two artists, one has a day rate of $200, lets call him Bob, the other a day rate of $300, lets call him Jerry. Jerry makes more money than Bob, right? Sure...
But wait, Bob works twice as fast as Jerry, so he can take on more contracts, and actually earns more yearly income, even though he has a lower day rate. Bob can even work less hours in a year than Jerry and still make more than him, because he works faster.
So, to make any sense of what freelancers actually make, you need way more information than anyone with a brain will give you.
Yeah the comparison to an oil change or a haircut is absolutely ridiculous. These jobs are very easy to set fixed rates for, as no matter who your customer is, they will take around the same amount of time, effort, and skill to do. Even hair dressers change different amounts for jobs that require more time or effort, like doing a haircut for a man vs a woman, or coloring hair or more elaborate things like perms, braids etc.
A more apt comparison would be to a general contractor. You wouldn't call around town and ask a general contract his "standard rate" to build a house, because no such thing exists. It depends on way too many factors to assign a simple number to.
... Yeah, just realized how bad of examples those were <_<" But Ballroom Instructor was where I came from >_>"
"Why are developers making so much money? Their job isn't life threatening like a police officer's is and it's not important to the future of the nation like a teacher's job is. It might be tedious or even grueling at times and require long hours and lots of commitment, but working in the video game industry is generally fun. People should be working in the gaming industry because they want to create awesome games. Not because they want to become rich. When did the gaming industry become so corporate?"
So, with same logic, those higher ups should also earn less. Same with movie directors and producer. They are making kick ass robots smashing each others and doomday's device firing shots! It's so much fun. They should get paid $15/hr instead.
Aside from all the other factors mentioned. I think the low wage on artist reflects the field itself(Similar to QA). Is becoming easier to do, and in many cases the entry level is open to anyone 18 years and older. Unlike other fields, which have a more institutional path.
One of my colleagues best compares it to workers during the automobile industry in the past. Lots of workers grinding in the factory, until the engineers and scientist find a way to make the process much faster and ultimately automated.
Aside from all the other factors mentioned. I think the low wage on artist reflects the field itself(Similar to QA). Is becoming easier to do, and in many cases the entry level is open to anyone 18 years and older. Unlike other fields, which have a more institutional path.
One of my colleagues best compares it to workers during the automobile industry in the past. Lots of workers grinding in the factory, until the engineers and scientist find a way to make the process much faster and ultimately automated.
The thing is, you can't ever automate art sure you can automate many of the processes within art. But at it's core art is about creativity and design. I welcome the automation because it allows me to do more in a single day. We all only have 24 hours in a day so the ability to do more in that same time frame is great!
The important thing is to realize how it will effect the industry.
As the tools get better and better I believe that 3d production artists will merge with concept artists and become one position. A studio full of "idea guys" who can also produce production quality assets(valve already does this to an extent). You'll have a lot more technical artists running the automated processes and perhaps a team of people doing retopo and the grunt work to get things fixed up on larger projects.
So remember, you're not simply someone on an assembly line. As an artist You're a highly specialized, skilled employee and therefore valuable.
Our field isn't getting any easier to do. Learning the tools is far more accessible now, but knowing the tools doesn't make you a great artist. Fundamentals make you a great artist. Design, color theory, anatomy, science, physics. That stuff takes a long time to learn.
So don't let anyone tell you that you're just a part of an assembly line! :P
As a skilled artist myself, I don't want the statement to come off the wrong way, but rather expressing honesty from experience.
Without a doubt folks in this field focus countless hours into their craft and some even go as far as abandoning social life all together until they begin collaboration with others. While is true that there is more to it than just downloading a software and learning through tutorials. In the industry itself what matters in the end is to achieve a high quality result in a timely fashioned. UV mapping today is not the same as it was in the late 1990s. In our society tools have a massive impact on our business and it can take jobs from the masses. (Sure no one can stop us from doing art on our own)
The faster a single individual can pump art like a mad man, the less openings there will be for others hoping to pursue this career. The harder we continue to crunch, is a clear sign they rather affect our work-life balance than hire a new fellow recruit to spread the work load.
So remember, you're not simply someone on an assembly line. As an artist You're a highly specialized, skilled employee and therefore valuable.
I would love to believe the above statement as an artist myself, but that is not the case at least not in the AAA side of things, cant speak on indie. I tried complaining against crunch once, and the warning was loosing my job. Clearly no value in the eyes of others, sadly.The salaries also speak for themselves. If we glorified only on the aspect of "At least I get payed doing what I love", we will be in bigger troubles. I wonder if doctors, follow the same mentality. is probably (I am going to rage quit if my annual wage is less than 145k :poly124:)
To conclude, surely the work load involve into the field is large, but the difficulty gap/institutional skill presented is decreasing. Before you either make this your career or not. Now, you can make it your hobby along side a better career, and still be able to produce high quality real time art comparable to those seen in the industry. Who needs school when you got free tutorials, countless resources, and access to the softwares for free.
@SecretPro - Do you have examples of work you've done?
The faster a single individual can pump art like a mad man, the less openings there will be for others hoping to pursue this career.
This is assuming there will be no more advancements in games. Instead of hiring less people, why not keep the SAME amount of people and just build a world that's 3x as large or has more variety in props or has better animation, etc.
If companies hired less people when stuff got easier than we'd still have PS1 era graphics (taken to an extreme). Using FF7 for an example, if 1 person today can just model all the characters, environments, etc, why hire anyone else? Why not just have AAA studios with 5 people producing PS1 era games?
@SecretPro - Do you have examples of work you've done?
Clearly created new account to remain anonymous, for the reason of more freely expressing myself, without the assertion of judgement from certain folks.
You don't have to take my comments as facts, since I know people rather take advice from someone more credible than from a random, I understand
. Now, you can make it your hobby along side a better career, and still be able to produce high quality real time art comparable to those seen in the industry. Who needs school when you got free tutorials, countless resources, and access to the softwares for free.
I really do not understand what you are trying to say?
I can watch loads of free tutorials on cooking awesome food and get easy to use awesome ovens and implements and maybe even make a good dish now and then but Im not a chef and cant be employed as a chef.
I dont see making art getting any easier because expectations are higher than ever and will continue to rise as the tools improve.
@SecretPro - Do you have examples of work you've done?
This is assuming there will be no more advancements in games. Instead of hiring less people, why not keep the SAME amount of people and just build a world that's 3x as large or has more variety in props or has better animation, etc.
If companies hired less people when stuff got easier than we'd still have PS1 era graphics (taken to an extreme). Using FF7 for an example, if 1 person today can just model all the characters, environments, etc, why hire anyone else? Why not just have AAA studios with 5 people producing PS1 era games?
You have to realized artist are not the only developers in a studio.
Also great point for bringing that up of having a studio with only 5 people. Take a good look at the indie devs now, without a doubt amazing work is being doing these days, with a small work force. A lot of factors why that is, but one worth mentioning is tools.
I would say that anyone who thinks artists are going to be automated out of the games industry is misguided at best, completely disconnected from reality at worst.
We have some great tools today, and many of the more menial and technical tasks can be automated, and there are certainly lots of room to further improve and automate the art pipeline. However, as mentioned above, you can't automate creativity, artistic style, and you certainly can't automate taste. So no matter how easy the tools get, if the person operating them lacks basic taste levels, the results are going to be terrible.
In addition to that, this line of thinking entirely ignores the fact that even with some very good advancements in tools, we're still nowhere near offsetting the time it takes to make the massive amount of content, up to the quality standards that people are expecting, especially for AAA style games. As hardware gets better and better, content creation demands will get pushed further and further. Unless someone introduces some truly revolutionary art content creation solution, this is always going to be a a big problem that only highly skilled, experienced artists can solve.
In reality, a make art button that displaces the artist workforce is a manager's wet dream and nothing more.
Also, anyone who thinks that experienced veteran artists can be replaced by kids fresh out of school clearly has never done portfolio review.
this is derailing off topic, clearly I am being questioned for making bold and honest statements(personal experience) that either bother people or promotes off topic questions.
Also note, there is more after our life time, we still have to master AI. Automation wont affect the artist, since in the end we have a dear passion towards the field. Ultimately my point being is, game industry salaries could use an update.
One thing we have to consider is that though might not replaced completely like factory workers, many aspect of creating game assets can be greatly reduced if the dev isn't aiming for AAA.
Quixel Suite's Megascan could really simplify the creation of environment stuff. Sure, it's not comparable to stuff pro veterans can come up, but it's more than enough to pass off as assets for indie games, even when used by amateurs.
There are also many software that can create character assets by using presets and slides to morph meshes. Again, it's not something super customized, but it's more than enough to make an indie game look good.
The quality of indie games will only improve over time. Soon it will be as good as AAA, minus the unnecessary crazy graphic less and less people still care about.
AAA game business is only to be on decline. Game companies working on AAA games are only 1 or 2 games away from bankruptcy, if they totally flop.
Yeah, the really big hole in this line of thinking is that as the tools have gotten better, so has the hardware and the expecations for the quality of work. It seems that no matter how good the tools get, the standards for the actual art grows in proportion (or even grows disproportionally higher) to the efficiency of the tools.
Quixel's Suite and the Substance designer stuff, as awesome as they are, are both great examples of how to make poor art very quickly in the hands of a novice, or how to automate a bunch of menial tasks in the hands of a pro. For both of these apps you need to feed it good content, a good model, bake, ao, etc. It doesn't do the work for you.
The worry that artists will be automated out of a job is as old as the games industry itself. Every time a cool new tool comes out, like Quixel's Suite, mesh fushion, marvelous designer, etc, people think that its just one more step to a make art button. The truth of the matter is, the make art button hasn't came yet, no matter how much doom and gloom people post about it. In reality, the tools are simply getting to the point where they are less and less in the way of the individual artist. Today, its easier than ever to get straight into the actual art creation and worry less about technical issues or terrible workflows. This empowers artists, it doesn't make them obsolete.
As Matt says, the make art button thing is a self-fullfilling prophecy. Just as giving in when you get threatened of losing your job for refusing to crunch is. We certainly reenforce the misconception that we're easily replaceable when we cave in to those threats. As long as we as a whole put up with that sort of treatment, we're going to continue to get disrespected. I know its not easy to tell people to put their job on the line in that situation, as people have families, mortgages, etc, but standing up for yourself is really the only way to change the cycle of abuse.
As an artist, your worth is much more than the sum of the computer buttons you know how to press. The sooner we collectively realize this, the better.
I really do not understand what you are trying to say?
I can watch loads of free tutorials on cooking awesome food and get easy to use awesome ovens and implements and maybe even make a good dish now and then but Im not a chef and cant be employed as a chef.
I dont see making art getting any easier because expectations are higher than ever and will continue to rise as the tools improve.
Weird, most folks start from doing this as a hobby(Mods, Indie, Personal Projects, etc) some decide to take it further and make it their career, others are happy with their current job and just do it for fun.
Weird, most folks start from doing this as a hobby(Mods, Indie, Personal Projects, etc) some decide to take it further and make it their career, others are happy with their current job and just do it for fun.
Doesn't this also apply to the cooking analogy he just used.
Doesn't this also apply to the cooking analogy he just used.
If you want to compare it that low, since I took it differently than sure. Keep in mind you can be a employed as a chef, just training on site(on the low level locations).
On the other hand for the actual career, you need certificates or some form of education, so hard to compare a field that is strict on education to one that is not.
Something more interesting to talk about in regards to Salary is Unions.
I've been curious about them historically and have researched them a lot lately. They often form to combat the very same practices we are seeing today - namely wage fixing, long hours, instability, poor work conditions , and stifling of opportunities for mobility in your career.
Absolutely, but I'm not so sure it'll work for games, the same way it didn't work out for VFX. The trouble is, developers are an easily replaceable commodity, especially artists. Contractors that unionise can be easily and quickly replaced by contractors that are not, and those outside of the union are always well placed to undercut those who are contractually obliged to certain things by their unions
Aside from all the other factors mentioned. I think the low wage on artist reflects the field itself(Similar to QA). Is becoming easier to do, and in many cases the entry level is open to anyone 18 years and older. Unlike other fields, which have a more institutional path.
Well to be fair, that could be said of a lot of jobs. Look at game programming for example, in many ways, making a 3D game now is easier than making a 3D game 20 years ago. I hooked up my N64 to play some Goldeneye with my brother and sister and the entire time I kept thinking about the development of the game. Basically everything was written in assembly, compared to modern games which are written in much easier to understand languages (Unity games can be made entirely in C# or even UnityScript!) Also, UE4 can let you make complicated games without having to write or understand a single line of code.
While game programmer salaries are still low for programming positions (compared to other industries that need programmers anyway) they aren't as underpaid as many artists are.
The problem with artist salaries is that many people consider making game art to be their dream job and more people get interested in the field every year so you'll ultimately see people willing to give up a chunk of their potential salary in exchange for getting to follow their dream. I'm not a professional in this industry but I bet a lot of people are guilty of accepting a lower salary than they think they are worth simply because they wanted to obtain a certain position at a certain studio.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure about what could be done to solve the issue. It'd probably be impossible to educate every person on their self-worth, and there are a lot of talented artists that are unemployed or working in some other field solely to pay bills.
Well to be fair, that could be said of a lot of jobs. Look at game programming for example, in many ways, making a 3D game now is easier than making a 3D game 20 years ago. I hooked up my N64 to play some Goldeneye with my brother and sister and the entire time I kept thinking about the development of the game. Basically everything was written in assembly, compared to modern games which are written in much easier to understand languages (Unity games can be made entirely in C# or even UnityScript!) Also, UE4 can let you make complicated games without having to write or understand a single line of code.
While game programmer salaries are still low for programming positions (compared to other industries that need programmers anyway) they aren't as underpaid as many artists are.
The problem with artist salaries is that many people consider making game art to be their dream job and more people get interested in the field every year so you'll ultimately see people willing to give up a chunk of their potential salary in exchange for getting to follow their dream. I'm not a professional in this industry but I bet a lot of people are guilty of accepting a lower salary than they think they are worth simply because they wanted to obtain a certain position at a certain studio.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure about what could be done to solve the issue. It'd probably be impossible to educate every person on their self-worth, and there are a lot of talented artists that are unemployed or working in some other field solely to pay bills.
There are plenty of examples out there of artists putting together games exclusively with BPs. It's pretty amazing actually, 10 years ago you had to be a skilled programmer before even thinking about putting together a 3D game, now, anybody who is dedicated enough can learn how to make one. I fully expect UE4 to change things even more with Blueprints once the engine gets older.
You can purchase a lot of amazing code assets from talented programmers using the Unity Asset Store, but I can only imagine what kind of crazy Blueprints will be available on the Unreal Marketplace considering BPs are much more accessible than C++.
Something more interesting to talk about in regards to Salary is Unions.
One of the challenges a union in this industry would face is being able to enforce a strike.
A strike works because the striking workers can prevent cheaper replacements from entering the premise and continuing production. When the product being produced is digital, and the means of production is basically commodity mass produced hardware and affordable software, production can happen anywhere.
A union that can't bring production to a halt doesn't have any bargaining power.
There are plenty of examples out there of artists putting together games exclusively with BPs. It's pretty amazing actually, 10 years ago you had to be a skilled programmer before even thinking about putting together a 3D game, now, anybody who is dedicated enough can learn how to make one. I fully expect UE4 to change things even more with Blueprints once the engine gets older.
You can do simple game mechanics in BP. The moment you want to do something more complex, or a serious project, you'll want to be doing things in code. Blueprint is fine for prototyping, but really bad for production 'code'.
Also, multiplayer falls down in blueprint, since you have far too limited control over replication. Much better to do the networking and replication in C++.
I can only imagine what kind of crazy Blueprints will be available on the Unreal Marketplace considering BPs are much more accessible than C++.
Really fucking bad ones. Non-programmers working with BP tend to produce horrific messes. I've worked on projects where level designers have been making blueprint objects, and the results were not good. All blueprint objects had to be replaced by yours truly, and I did the majority of it in native code.
You can do simple game mechanics in BP. The moment you want to do something more complex, or a serious project, you'll want to be doing things in code. Blueprint is fine for prototyping, but really bad for production 'code'.
Also, multiplayer falls down in blueprint, since you have far too limited control over replication. Much better to do the networking and replication in C++.
Really fucking bad ones. Non-programmers working with BP tend to produce horrific messes. I've worked on projects where level designers have been making blueprint objects, and the results were not good. All blueprint objects had to be replaced by yours truly, and I did the majority of it in native code.
I guess complexity is subjective. Making even the most primitive game imaginable can be a daunting task for somebody that has never touched code before. A simple side scroller or platformer could take a long time if you've never written any code before for example, but with the simplicity of Blueprints, somebody who has never looked at code before can get a decent enough looking result in little time.
An animator on my team's current project for example, couldn't create a basic "collect the cubes on the screen" platformer in UDK without following a step by step tutorial and copying all of his code off the internet. But with Blueprints, that same person was able to make a platformer of the same quality in a day without having to reference a tutorial at all.
I've never worked in a proper production environment before so I can only imagine how effective or ineffective BPs are to a professional team, but I've seen some pretty great content on the UE forums that could probably be polished and sold at some point.
You can do simple game mechanics in BP. The moment you want to do something more complex, or a serious project, you'll want to be doing things in code. Blueprint is fine for prototyping, but really bad for production 'code'.
Blueprint can be really powerful when you approach it from a programming perspective (ie: taking an OOP approach and making use of the interfaces and macros). One big problem there is that most people who use Blueprint are not going to be approaching it from a programming perspective. Those who would are more likely spending their time in Visual Studio instead of the BP editor.
Still, BP doesn't solve everything and my team has found it's best used mostly as an event controller in the map, controlling mechanics that were constructed in C++. I don't think that the accessibility of Blueprint is going to bring non-coders to the point of competing with the big games.
Like you said, BP is great for the simple mechanics, but the complex gameplay is still going to need code. And if for some reason we ever really did reach a point where a node based system like Blueprint was powerful enough to replace code, you'd still want the programmers with a firm understanding of computer science fundamentals to be the ones using it anyway. And someone who is clean and organized. I've seen some pretty messy Kismet back in the UDK days.
I would love to see this for Europe!
Interesting statistics - but also a insight, that even the industry
gets billions - the artists get so less.
If this isnt changing in the future, i think ill change.
The people claiming we make too much or too little money equally confound me :P
I make more money than a machinist, which was the family business until the US manufacturing industry collapsed, so I think I'm doing pretty good.
As the tools got better we've seen time to create assets expand, from days to weeks and more. So if automation is going to put us out of the job it's got a long way to go
As the tools got better we've seen time to create assets expand, from days to weeks and more. So if automation is going to put us out of the job it's got a long way to go
Exactly. The expectations/quality bar has risen so much higher, that even with the way better tools that we have today it still takes more time than ever to actually create the content. Expectations have grow exponentially faster than the tools.
It will take some genuinely revolutionary toolset to reverse this trend.
Replies
Not only that, a "freelance rate" isn't really a thing. Freelance rates are determined by complexity of asset, duration of contract (I might charge a client less if they can provide me with long term steady work), specific client/client requirements, type of work, all sorts of things. You can't give a simple number like a yearly wage because its significantly more complex than that.
Even if you knew the day/hourly rate of every freelance artist out there, you don't know how long they are spending per asset so that number is still meaningless.
Say you have two artists, one has a day rate of $200, lets call him Bob, the other a day rate of $300, lets call him Jerry. Jerry makes more money than Bob, right? Sure...
But wait, Bob works twice as fast as Jerry, so he can take on more contracts, and actually earns more yearly income, even though he has a lower day rate. Bob can even work less hours in a year than Jerry and still make more than him, because he works faster.
So, to make any sense of what freelancers actually make, you need way more information than anyone with a brain will give you.
A more apt comparison would be to a general contractor. You wouldn't call around town and ask a general contract his "standard rate" to build a house, because no such thing exists. It depends on way too many factors to assign a simple number to.
So, with same logic, those higher ups should also earn less. Same with movie directors and producer. They are making kick ass robots smashing each others and doomday's device firing shots! It's so much fun. They should get paid $15/hr instead.
One of my colleagues best compares it to workers during the automobile industry in the past. Lots of workers grinding in the factory, until the engineers and scientist find a way to make the process much faster and ultimately automated.
The thing is, you can't ever automate art
The important thing is to realize how it will effect the industry.
As the tools get better and better I believe that 3d production artists will merge with concept artists and become one position. A studio full of "idea guys" who can also produce production quality assets(valve already does this to an extent). You'll have a lot more technical artists running the automated processes and perhaps a team of people doing retopo and the grunt work to get things fixed up on larger projects.
So remember, you're not simply someone on an assembly line. As an artist You're a highly specialized, skilled employee and therefore valuable.
Our field isn't getting any easier to do. Learning the tools is far more accessible now, but knowing the tools doesn't make you a great artist. Fundamentals make you a great artist. Design, color theory, anatomy, science, physics. That stuff takes a long time to learn.
So don't let anyone tell you that you're just a part of an assembly line! :P
Without a doubt folks in this field focus countless hours into their craft and some even go as far as abandoning social life all together until they begin collaboration with others. While is true that there is more to it than just downloading a software and learning through tutorials. In the industry itself what matters in the end is to achieve a high quality result in a timely fashioned. UV mapping today is not the same as it was in the late 1990s. In our society tools have a massive impact on our business and it can take jobs from the masses. (Sure no one can stop us from doing art on our own)
The faster a single individual can pump art like a mad man, the less openings there will be for others hoping to pursue this career. The harder we continue to crunch, is a clear sign they rather affect our work-life balance than hire a new fellow recruit to spread the work load.
I would love to believe the above statement as an artist myself, but that is not the case at least not in the AAA side of things, cant speak on indie. I tried complaining against crunch once, and the warning was loosing my job. Clearly no value in the eyes of others, sadly.The salaries also speak for themselves. If we glorified only on the aspect of "At least I get payed doing what I love", we will be in bigger troubles. I wonder if doctors, follow the same mentality. is probably (I am going to rage quit if my annual wage is less than 145k :poly124:)
To conclude, surely the work load involve into the field is large, but the difficulty gap/institutional skill presented is decreasing. Before you either make this your career or not. Now, you can make it your hobby along side a better career, and still be able to produce high quality real time art comparable to those seen in the industry. Who needs school when you got free tutorials, countless resources, and access to the softwares for free.
This is assuming there will be no more advancements in games. Instead of hiring less people, why not keep the SAME amount of people and just build a world that's 3x as large or has more variety in props or has better animation, etc.
If companies hired less people when stuff got easier than we'd still have PS1 era graphics (taken to an extreme). Using FF7 for an example, if 1 person today can just model all the characters, environments, etc, why hire anyone else? Why not just have AAA studios with 5 people producing PS1 era games?
Clearly created new account to remain anonymous, for the reason of more freely expressing myself, without the assertion of judgement from certain folks.
You don't have to take my comments as facts, since I know people rather take advice from someone more credible than from a random, I understand
Yea, it's just a bit hard to trust someone that's 100% anon. on the internet these days.
I really do not understand what you are trying to say?
I can watch loads of free tutorials on cooking awesome food and get easy to use awesome ovens and implements and maybe even make a good dish now and then but Im not a chef and cant be employed as a chef.
I dont see making art getting any easier because expectations are higher than ever and will continue to rise as the tools improve.
I suppose that's because then the hardware market'll be gone
You have to realized artist are not the only developers in a studio.
Also great point for bringing that up of having a studio with only 5 people. Take a good look at the indie devs now, without a doubt amazing work is being doing these days, with a small work force. A lot of factors why that is, but one worth mentioning is tools.
We have some great tools today, and many of the more menial and technical tasks can be automated, and there are certainly lots of room to further improve and automate the art pipeline. However, as mentioned above, you can't automate creativity, artistic style, and you certainly can't automate taste. So no matter how easy the tools get, if the person operating them lacks basic taste levels, the results are going to be terrible.
In addition to that, this line of thinking entirely ignores the fact that even with some very good advancements in tools, we're still nowhere near offsetting the time it takes to make the massive amount of content, up to the quality standards that people are expecting, especially for AAA style games. As hardware gets better and better, content creation demands will get pushed further and further. Unless someone introduces some truly revolutionary art content creation solution, this is always going to be a a big problem that only highly skilled, experienced artists can solve.
In reality, a make art button that displaces the artist workforce is a manager's wet dream and nothing more.
Also, anyone who thinks that experienced veteran artists can be replaced by kids fresh out of school clearly has never done portfolio review.
Also note, there is more after our life time, we still have to master AI. Automation wont affect the artist, since in the end we have a dear passion towards the field. Ultimately my point being is, game industry salaries could use an update.
Quixel Suite's Megascan could really simplify the creation of environment stuff. Sure, it's not comparable to stuff pro veterans can come up, but it's more than enough to pass off as assets for indie games, even when used by amateurs.
There are also many software that can create character assets by using presets and slides to morph meshes. Again, it's not something super customized, but it's more than enough to make an indie game look good.
The quality of indie games will only improve over time. Soon it will be as good as AAA, minus the unnecessary crazy graphic less and less people still care about.
AAA game business is only to be on decline. Game companies working on AAA games are only 1 or 2 games away from bankruptcy, if they totally flop.
Quixel's Suite and the Substance designer stuff, as awesome as they are, are both great examples of how to make poor art very quickly in the hands of a novice, or how to automate a bunch of menial tasks in the hands of a pro. For both of these apps you need to feed it good content, a good model, bake, ao, etc. It doesn't do the work for you.
The worry that artists will be automated out of a job is as old as the games industry itself. Every time a cool new tool comes out, like Quixel's Suite, mesh fushion, marvelous designer, etc, people think that its just one more step to a make art button. The truth of the matter is, the make art button hasn't came yet, no matter how much doom and gloom people post about it. In reality, the tools are simply getting to the point where they are less and less in the way of the individual artist. Today, its easier than ever to get straight into the actual art creation and worry less about technical issues or terrible workflows. This empowers artists, it doesn't make them obsolete.
As Matt says, the make art button thing is a self-fullfilling prophecy. Just as giving in when you get threatened of losing your job for refusing to crunch is. We certainly reenforce the misconception that we're easily replaceable when we cave in to those threats. As long as we as a whole put up with that sort of treatment, we're going to continue to get disrespected. I know its not easy to tell people to put their job on the line in that situation, as people have families, mortgages, etc, but standing up for yourself is really the only way to change the cycle of abuse.
As an artist, your worth is much more than the sum of the computer buttons you know how to press. The sooner we collectively realize this, the better.
Weird, most folks start from doing this as a hobby(Mods, Indie, Personal Projects, etc) some decide to take it further and make it their career, others are happy with their current job and just do it for fun.
Doesn't this also apply to the cooking analogy he just used.
If you want to compare it that low, since I took it differently than sure. Keep in mind you can be a employed as a chef, just training on site(on the low level locations).
On the other hand for the actual career, you need certificates or some form of education, so hard to compare a field that is strict on education to one that is not.
If I am wrong, feel free to correct the mistake.
Absolutely, but I'm not so sure it'll work for games, the same way it didn't work out for VFX. The trouble is, developers are an easily replaceable commodity, especially artists. Contractors that unionise can be easily and quickly replaced by contractors that are not, and those outside of the union are always well placed to undercut those who are contractually obliged to certain things by their unions
While game programmer salaries are still low for programming positions (compared to other industries that need programmers anyway) they aren't as underpaid as many artists are.
The problem with artist salaries is that many people consider making game art to be their dream job and more people get interested in the field every year so you'll ultimately see people willing to give up a chunk of their potential salary in exchange for getting to follow their dream. I'm not a professional in this industry but I bet a lot of people are guilty of accepting a lower salary than they think they are worth simply because they wanted to obtain a certain position at a certain studio.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure about what could be done to solve the issue. It'd probably be impossible to educate every person on their self-worth, and there are a lot of talented artists that are unemployed or working in some other field solely to pay bills.
Say what ?
You can purchase a lot of amazing code assets from talented programmers using the Unity Asset Store, but I can only imagine what kind of crazy Blueprints will be available on the Unreal Marketplace considering BPs are much more accessible than C++.
One of the challenges a union in this industry would face is being able to enforce a strike.
A strike works because the striking workers can prevent cheaper replacements from entering the premise and continuing production. When the product being produced is digital, and the means of production is basically commodity mass produced hardware and affordable software, production can happen anywhere.
A union that can't bring production to a halt doesn't have any bargaining power.
You can do simple game mechanics in BP. The moment you want to do something more complex, or a serious project, you'll want to be doing things in code. Blueprint is fine for prototyping, but really bad for production 'code'.
Also, multiplayer falls down in blueprint, since you have far too limited control over replication. Much better to do the networking and replication in C++.
Really fucking bad ones. Non-programmers working with BP tend to produce horrific messes. I've worked on projects where level designers have been making blueprint objects, and the results were not good. All blueprint objects had to be replaced by yours truly, and I did the majority of it in native code.
An animator on my team's current project for example, couldn't create a basic "collect the cubes on the screen" platformer in UDK without following a step by step tutorial and copying all of his code off the internet. But with Blueprints, that same person was able to make a platformer of the same quality in a day without having to reference a tutorial at all.
I've never worked in a proper production environment before so I can only imagine how effective or ineffective BPs are to a professional team, but I've seen some pretty great content on the UE forums that could probably be polished and sold at some point.
Blueprint can be really powerful when you approach it from a programming perspective (ie: taking an OOP approach and making use of the interfaces and macros). One big problem there is that most people who use Blueprint are not going to be approaching it from a programming perspective. Those who would are more likely spending their time in Visual Studio instead of the BP editor.
Still, BP doesn't solve everything and my team has found it's best used mostly as an event controller in the map, controlling mechanics that were constructed in C++. I don't think that the accessibility of Blueprint is going to bring non-coders to the point of competing with the big games.
Like you said, BP is great for the simple mechanics, but the complex gameplay is still going to need code. And if for some reason we ever really did reach a point where a node based system like Blueprint was powerful enough to replace code, you'd still want the programmers with a firm understanding of computer science fundamentals to be the ones using it anyway. And someone who is clean and organized. I've seen some pretty messy Kismet back in the UDK days.
...I've seen kismet setups that would make Cthulu cry.
That is the greatest analogy I have heard all month. That is officially the quote of the day.
Interesting statistics - but also a insight, that even the industry
gets billions - the artists get so less.
If this isnt changing in the future, i think ill change.
I make more money than a machinist, which was the family business until the US manufacturing industry collapsed, so I think I'm doing pretty good.
As the tools got better we've seen time to create assets expand, from days to weeks and more. So if automation is going to put us out of the job it's got a long way to go
Exactly. The expectations/quality bar has risen so much higher, that even with the way better tools that we have today it still takes more time than ever to actually create the content. Expectations have grow exponentially faster than the tools.
It will take some genuinely revolutionary toolset to reverse this trend.