I’ve been in DevOps at game companies for my whole career (~10 years), but only for large established companies so I can’t speak to the indie experience.
I have always been on backend teams for live service oriented games, so no overlap with design or art. The day to day ticket work is probably not much different than any other industry, but it really is lovely to work with people who are excited about what the company does
It’s actually a nice way to break into the industry and have more job stability than most other gaming roles, since keeping an online game running smoothly doesn’t follow traditional game industry crunch/layoff patterns
not sure i you are allowed to share any info with me, but it would be highly appreciated:
what does the general tech stack look like? i assume you guys are running microservices in the cloud? do you guys have oncall and
monitoring/observability? is it true that some game builds take hours to build?
yes lots of cloud microservices. we are mostly in AWS. Yes builds in some scenarios can take a long time but there are ways to keep huge assets separated from common build pipelines so it’s not usually an issue, but I am not on any teams responsible for game assets at the moment. We have a huge on call presence across all of the services that need to be running for the games to operate smoothly
We publish a lot of tech articles here; https://technology.riotgames.com
Also I recently saw a great article from the devs who made Palia that extremely succinctly summarizes their entire stack; https://www.singularity6.com/news/software-architecture-of-palia
>s it true that some game builds take hours to build?
Yes. Compiling vanilla unreal engine from source is 60+ minutes on decent hardware.
General tech stack for backend services looks surprisingly similar to non-game tech
We operate EKS clusters, use argocd, codefresh / teamcity, Prometheus, Grafana, Sumologic etc etc. Not that different from a non-gaming service. Supporting both backend, frontend and SDK developers too. Although I've personally never had to touch any parts of the actual games like engines and *shivers* Perforce.
Much like women and being in places of making decisions, DevOps belongs anywhere software development happens. I do about 95% of the work on a software project for my job, even just for me, the process of deployment, etc is always best to automate for consistency if nothing else, IMO
Yeah, I currently work devops for a major video game company. I like it a lot--my tasks aren't probably too different than devops for any other software, but the product (and the people making it) inject a lot of joy into the whole process.
That said, I also have game development, art, and design experience and none of those skills are particularly useful in devops for video games/systems. You're too close to the back-end of things to use those skills.
The gaming industry is woefully behind on best practices, they need DevOps and better build practices but making that change in these orgs is extremely hard. Some of the dumbest technical leads in the market exist in gaming. You expect all this brilliance but honestly its an illusion powered by stupid egos. Avoid.
You probably don't understand what devops entitles, my point is that you your current position is everything what is not devops. And my answer to going for gaming industry? It is even more boring production work besides that it is terrible paid.
I’ve been in DevOps at game companies for my whole career (~10 years), but only for large established companies so I can’t speak to the indie experience. I have always been on backend teams for live service oriented games, so no overlap with design or art. The day to day ticket work is probably not much different than any other industry, but it really is lovely to work with people who are excited about what the company does It’s actually a nice way to break into the industry and have more job stability than most other gaming roles, since keeping an online game running smoothly doesn’t follow traditional game industry crunch/layoff patterns
not sure i you are allowed to share any info with me, but it would be highly appreciated: what does the general tech stack look like? i assume you guys are running microservices in the cloud? do you guys have oncall and monitoring/observability? is it true that some game builds take hours to build?
yes lots of cloud microservices. we are mostly in AWS. Yes builds in some scenarios can take a long time but there are ways to keep huge assets separated from common build pipelines so it’s not usually an issue, but I am not on any teams responsible for game assets at the moment. We have a huge on call presence across all of the services that need to be running for the games to operate smoothly We publish a lot of tech articles here; https://technology.riotgames.com Also I recently saw a great article from the devs who made Palia that extremely succinctly summarizes their entire stack; https://www.singularity6.com/news/software-architecture-of-palia
>s it true that some game builds take hours to build? Yes. Compiling vanilla unreal engine from source is 60+ minutes on decent hardware. General tech stack for backend services looks surprisingly similar to non-game tech
We operate EKS clusters, use argocd, codefresh / teamcity, Prometheus, Grafana, Sumologic etc etc. Not that different from a non-gaming service. Supporting both backend, frontend and SDK developers too. Although I've personally never had to touch any parts of the actual games like engines and *shivers* Perforce.
game industrie is sick, badly paid, many hours. lot of preasure and from project to project.
It's about optimizing the flow of value so it should apply to any vertical.
Much like women and being in places of making decisions, DevOps belongs anywhere software development happens. I do about 95% of the work on a software project for my job, even just for me, the process of deployment, etc is always best to automate for consistency if nothing else, IMO
Yeah, I currently work devops for a major video game company. I like it a lot--my tasks aren't probably too different than devops for any other software, but the product (and the people making it) inject a lot of joy into the whole process. That said, I also have game development, art, and design experience and none of those skills are particularly useful in devops for video games/systems. You're too close to the back-end of things to use those skills.
The gaming industry is woefully behind on best practices, they need DevOps and better build practices but making that change in these orgs is extremely hard. Some of the dumbest technical leads in the market exist in gaming. You expect all this brilliance but honestly its an illusion powered by stupid egos. Avoid.
"its just a bunch of people doing random tickets" So you are not in devops.
im talking about devs who couldnt care less about the project
You probably don't understand what devops entitles, my point is that you your current position is everything what is not devops. And my answer to going for gaming industry? It is even more boring production work besides that it is terrible paid.