The problems start at some extremely base assumptions of concept and focus - stakeholders will often treat a game as a branding exercise akin to a toy, just on a larger scale. Or they might conceive of it like a movie, with a Hollywood-style marketing push. Or it might be treated as "entertainment software," with a focus on having the best technology and the most features. All of these are not really correct, but we can fool ourselves into thinking they're correct because entities outside of the industry(namely, IP owners and other hardware/software manufacturers) will bring their money and their world-view/assumptions to the table, and through sheer trial and error game devs have found a few ways to satisfy these stakeholders and make something that can potentially turn a profit, even though the historical record indicates that the "value" the stakeholders brought to the table usually wasn't a contributing factor in the biggest hits.

But once you start down that path, the top-down directive forces the development team to start doing unnatural things that work against product viability and realistic ship dates. Soon, everyone's dissatisfied and it just becomes a hellhole where the team works as individuals, takes their paychecks, and "looks out for number one." But a lot of people want to work in the industry, and they'll take bad money over no money.

It's the same problem as in startups as a whole - find an original, scalable game concept. Work on making it marketable. Then you can start spending big to make a refined, feature-heavy implementation.

In both cases, it was very apparent that the industry is built around taking advantage of peoples' passions and love of gaming. Pay is low, hours are ridiculous, and respect is sadly missing. People put their heart and soul into what they are building and get tossed with little to no thought whatsoever.

If you are absolutely passionate about working in the game industry, I say go for it. But go in with eyes wide open: it is a tough place to be.

It is more entertainment industry than software industry, and, just like most other entertainment industry groups have guilds/unions to protect their interests (screen actors guild, screen writers guild, etc), there probably ought to be a computer programmers guild as well.

Still, by far and away the most interesting Java project I've ever worked on. I'd never heard of so many enterprisey technologies around a game before (unfortunately, I don't know what would be covered under my NDA, so I probably can't say much more than that :).

PS. I loved the space jam game when I was kid!

I'm glad you liked Space Jam. I was really disappointed that the game turned out so basic. Some of the original ideas were much more interesting, but I guess they figured they wouldn't market as well to the target demographic (don't ask me what they were; it was a long time ago).

  I've had several jobs in game companies, and several non-game jobs too. The 
  biggest difference I've noticed is that outside the game industry it feels like
  co-workers, managers, etc. are actually happy to see you at work. Outside the 
  games industry there seems to be a strong sense of networking, a sense that 
  people want to find good workers they can build a team with so they can all 
  move up the company ladder. In the game industry, everyone else in the
  industry is like a competitor, someone who might steal that job you want.

As for the friendless of the people, while I like working in games for the games, the culture that develops around the people working on games is the bigger draw.

This is true for any competent software developer with half reasonable contacts or experience (at least here in Ireland - a week ago I had a conversation with a recruitment company and they confirmed that there are more jobs than good programmers here).

My studio (EA2D, a new division of EA) is developing web-based games. We get to have all the fun of building badass games without the stress of delivering a hard-media product. In response to the post title: yes, for us, it is a very happy place.

Incidentally, we're aggressively hiring the best and brightest: http://www.ea2d.com/jobs/

Contact me directly: mikeb@ea2d.com

Many enjoyed playing games, so naturally they decided to into the this field. These individuals will compensate their lack of experience and theoretical understanding of many CS subjects with sheer enthusiasm, they will work 12 hour days, weekends, for relatively low pay, putting up with lots of crap, until ... they burn out. When they burn out, there is another battalion of enthusiastic kids waiting at the door and, then the cycle continues.

It is not that this doesn't happen with other programming jobs, but there are just not that many people who are as excited about database scalability or say, machine learning as there are individuals excited about games. Exploiting someone like that and having them burn out, would mean having to look long and hard to replace them. Therefore pay is better, hours are better and the environment is healthier.

There are legitimate gripes, complaints and out right abuses in the game industry. But much of the brokenness in process or hours or management or etc also exists everywhere else. It is the unfortunate nature of a work environment. You do not read/hear about everywhere else as much fewer people are passionately following their output or dreaming of breaking in.

In contrast though it seems like the WoW devs have a pretty brutal schedule in order to pump out expansions and updates fast enough to keep giving the millions of players enough to do that they won't stop paying the subscription.

I worked as a game reviewer and I could actively avoid bad games, so there's obviously an element in the game you made that was drawing people's attention and keeping it. Find that element, redevelop and release anew.

From what I could tell a new-franchise in games had as good odds as a movie of hitting big - IE purely random. Simply try again.

I'd be happy to help if you have any questions.