Still Want to Make Games?

Good. Now Is the Worst — and Best — Time to Start.

The CS job market is contracting. AI is reshaping software. And yet, game development may be the most human-proof career in tech.

If you've been watching the tech industry for the past two years, you've seen the headlines. Mass layoffs at major studios. Junior developer roles evaporating as AI code generation matures. Computer science graduates struggling to find entry-level positions that barely existed a few years ago. It's a sobering landscape — especially if you're considering a career in game development, which sits right at the intersection of "creative field" and "software engineering."

So is it still worth it? I'd argue yes — but with clear eyes about what that actually means.

The honest picture

The CS market contraction is real and it disproportionately affects roles that are purely functional — CRUD apps, boilerplate backends, routine front-end work. These are exactly the tasks AI handles with frightening competence. A junior developer who spent their first years writing predictable code is increasingly competing with a well-prompted language model.

Game development is different, though not immune. Big studios like EA, Ubisoft, and Unity itself have shed thousands of positions since 2023. Mid-sized developers have consolidated. The era of easy greenlit AAA projects seems to be fading. If your plan was to graduate, send out résumés, and land at a major studio — that path is genuinely harder than it was. 

"AI can generate a shader, debug a collision loop, and scaffold a UI. It cannot decide what a game should feel like to play."

What AI actually can't do (yet)

Here's where it gets interesting. The parts of game development that AI is disrupting — asset generation, boilerplate systems, repetitive animation loops — were never the soul of the craft. What remains stubbornly human is the question of feel: the weight of a sword swing, the satisfying arc of a jump, the moment a player loses track of time. These emerge from taste, iteration, and empathy — things that can't be reliably prompted.

Game design, level design, narrative systems, sound direction, creative direction — these disciplines are not disappearing. In some ways, AI tools are making individual developers more potent: a single person with strong creative instincts and AI-assisted production can build something that previously required a team. The indie renaissance hasn't ended; it's evolving.

The mindset shift that matters

The old model was: learn a skill, join a studio, move up the ladder. The new model looks more like: develop taste, build things obsessively, and treat AI as a collaborator that handles the tedious parts so you can focus on the interesting ones.

This means the bar for entering the industry has changed shape, not just height. You don't need to be a better C++ programmer than a language model. You need to be a more interesting designer than any prompt. Technical fluency still matters — understanding what's happening under the hood makes you a better director of AI tools — but it's no longer the sole differentiator.

The practical case for choosing game dev anyway

The global games market continues to grow, passing $200 billion and showing no signs of reversal. Demand for interactive experiences is expanding into simulation, training, and virtual production. The tools to build games — Godot, Unreal, Unity, custom engines — are more accessible than ever. And crucially, games are one of the last software categories where the human fingerprint is a feature, not a bug. Players can tell when something has been made with care.

If you're drawn to games because you want to build things people love, because you find the design problems genuinely interesting, because you've spent hours modding or prototyping or just obsessively studying why certain experiences work — those instincts are worth following. The market will reward craft that AI can't replicate. It will punish generic output regardless of who or what produced it.

Go in with open eyes

Don't romanticize the industry. Studio culture can be brutal, crunch is real, and the gap between "passionate indie dev" and "sustainable career" is wide. Have a financial runway. Consider the indie path seriously — lower ceiling, but more control. Specialise in areas that require judgment: systems design, creative direction, UX, audio. Learn to use AI tools without becoming dependent on them for the parts that define your voice.

The CS market decline is a signal that generic software work is being commoditised. Game development, at its best, was never generic. If you're willing to bring something irreplaceable to it, the field still needs you — maybe more than before.