I’m hoping to get into a pretty well regarded game dev school in Sweden that is $25k USD for the entire degree. Comparing it with anything similar in the US is mind boggling. Schools here are impossibly expensive
Future games, innit? The one the ceo of the company that made It Takes Two finished?
It’s mind boggling to me that this school exists. I mean they have the achievements of the alumni to schow, so good for them.
But still it’s a paid school for game dev, famous for crunch, and worse salary than “normal” dev. So not only will you work more, and earn less, you also have to pay for your studies, since standard CS is free.
I’m a little confused here, I’m not EU/Swedish citizen wouldn’t any of my studies require me to pay? I care about money very little which is part of why I’ve been feeling so soul sucked at my current job. I’ve only been here for money for a bit now and I hate it. In a lot of ways I’d rather just be poor. I was happier when I was working for like 1/5 what I make now but felt excited about what I did
I love games and game making. I’ve been skirting around the industry for over 15 years at this point and haven’t been able to crack in yet. Future Games, or any of the schools I’ve applied to, is an opportunity to be on a visa for nearly the entire trump term and hopefully network enough to land a job after school. So I’m not just paying for education I’m paying for my own safety
The crunch is for real but also the job culture in the US is batshit. My first job out of college I ended up pulling 16 hour days 7 days/week. Everywhere here it is expected you’re going to do more work than you’re paid for or you risk getting fired. Crunch time in Sweden sounds like normal time in the US tbh
I didn’t look at the curriculum of the game dev school but from my personal experience studying CS I would say that what you learn there isn’t really comparable to CS besides the programming part
Agreed, and I kind of wish CS and game dev weren’t considered so similar. They both program, sure, and those skills can be moved.
Go ask a Microsoft dev to explain game theory, hotkey availability, and UX. Then, ask a game dev the same questions. You’ll get wildly different answers because they wildly different goals
This is why the tradeification of engineering should be viewed with skepticism. An engineering degree should give you a strong technical background in computing, physics, math, and software without over-specializing. You are meant to learn specific tradecraft on the job.
Having over a 25 year career done development in all kinds of areas including gamedev, there is quite a big difference in way of thinking and doing stuff between anything with user interaction and server-side stuff, and gamedev specifically also differs a lot from the rest of areas of user-facing software because it’s very performance oriented, way closer to the bare metal than the rest (in smartphone apps you’re working on top of libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries, in gamedev you make GPU shaders in a variant of C which very tightly tied to the specifics of how that hardware works), and each game is pretty much a unique user interface in programming terms (i.e. there much less reusability, especially of assets, than in say web or smartapp development).
(I mean, in server-side stuff you’re for example worrying about transactional integrity during database access, system design for balanced distributed handling of requests or networked access to APIs exposed via REST interfaces, whilst in in gamedev you’re for example doing vector maths to project a user click on the screen onto a game plane in the 3D universe, moving the bones in 3D models to animate them and writting shaders to produce effects like a 3D model being consumed from the point of impact when hit by a shot.
Mind you, for me personally all of them are cool challenges (which is probably why I’m one of those unusal developers who is generic to the point of sillyness) but they’re definitelly very different, even in the kinds of architectural approaches used for the software being developed.
I’ve spent more of my career doing server-side stuff than other areas and it’s like night and day when it comes to IT security between server-side dev and gamedev, probably because server-side is networked and generally is done for much more important targets (valuable data and even actual financial assets of big companies, rather than an individual’s game state or machine) so there a big expectation that the best external attackers (and a veritable army of script kiddies) will be hammering at anything a server-side component exposes via a network interface, trying to hack it.
Mind you, I still bitched and moaned at the lack of IT Security awareness of some of my colleagues when I was doing server side stuff :)
And that’s exactly the thing, the threat model is so different. In gamedev, they’re thinking about those networking issues for sure but man oh man are they WAY more worried about RCE in those drivers you mentioned earlier.
Why? For the same reason Emacs is a text editor, internet browser, and Spotify client. For the same reason that “will it run doom” is even a question. Because their game got hacked before they even opened the first text file to make the game
University in Sweden is free for swedish citizens, it used to be free for foreign students as well, but since some years ago the universities are allowed to put fees on foreign students. Dont remember the exact details of how it works.
Edit: looked it up, still free for people from EU, EES and Switzerland, and people living in Sweden with a resident permit.
I was around when they introduced it. They basically killed some programs because it went from a few students to none. Because why would you pay for a Swedish uni noone heard of instead of a bit more for a famous uni. It was a stupid policy.
So I would think the brain drain would have happened a long time ago, like back in the 90s. Sadly, most of us Americans will just keep paying more and more for stuff rather than give any of it up.
It is quite hard to even get accepted to a foreign undergrad program out of high school. Grad school is a bit easier but it’s still difficult and traditionally there is just enormous amounts of money in the US academic system so going abroad really needs to be something you prioritize. Also many US grad students don’t pay tuition for PhD track programs. You get an assistantship with a stipend.
You get paid for doing a PhD in Europe, too. Also, teams tend to be very international, sometimes majority or even exclusively so.
So if students from third-world countries can come over regularly with few issues to live and work here, I wonder what’s holding back Americans.
Ok. I must have failed to formulate my question properly. I’m sorry for that.
Let me try again.
I know moving is expansive, takes much of time and is really exhausting. But the post talks about scientists. The little interaction I had with scientists have led me to the believe, that it is much more easy for scientists to move even across nations and even across continents. You said moving is no option for americans. Why is that?
I understand what you meant now, apologies. I thought it was a dig.
The person I was responding to said “most Americans,” and I was responding to that statement.
It is difficult for most Americans to immigrate anywhere, unless they have skills/knowledge that the country they are attempting to move to is having trouble filling or independent wealth. Perhaps soon, we’ll be able to claim refugee status or political asylum, but I certainly hope it doesn’t get there.
The message “america is best” used to be shouted everywhere they had a chance. It might be bullshit, but say it enough and it sticks.
Then again, the scars that the nazi’s left behind are still visible. With how recent that was back in the 90’s I wouldn’t blame people for being careful. Moving countries isn’t a thing most people do every few decades.
Their schools were already orders of magnitude cheaper. Get ready for extreme brain drain!
Completely free. Kind of. It’s like less than €200 a year to study at a university in Finland.
This is true only for students from the EU/ETA area: for students from outside it is a minimum of 1500€/year to study in a school of higher education.
So the cost of like one class in the US.
Which is still cheap for many Americans.
I’m hoping to get into a pretty well regarded game dev school in Sweden that is $25k USD for the entire degree. Comparing it with anything similar in the US is mind boggling. Schools here are impossibly expensive
Future games, innit? The one the ceo of the company that made It Takes Two finished?
It’s mind boggling to me that this school exists. I mean they have the achievements of the alumni to schow, so good for them.
But still it’s a paid school for game dev, famous for crunch, and worse salary than “normal” dev. So not only will you work more, and earn less, you also have to pay for your studies, since standard CS is free.
I’m a little confused here, I’m not EU/Swedish citizen wouldn’t any of my studies require me to pay? I care about money very little which is part of why I’ve been feeling so soul sucked at my current job. I’ve only been here for money for a bit now and I hate it. In a lot of ways I’d rather just be poor. I was happier when I was working for like 1/5 what I make now but felt excited about what I did
I love games and game making. I’ve been skirting around the industry for over 15 years at this point and haven’t been able to crack in yet. Future Games, or any of the schools I’ve applied to, is an opportunity to be on a visa for nearly the entire trump term and hopefully network enough to land a job after school. So I’m not just paying for education I’m paying for my own safety
The crunch is for real but also the job culture in the US is batshit. My first job out of college I ended up pulling 16 hour days 7 days/week. Everywhere here it is expected you’re going to do more work than you’re paid for or you risk getting fired. Crunch time in Sweden sounds like normal time in the US tbh
I didn’t look at the curriculum of the game dev school but from my personal experience studying CS I would say that what you learn there isn’t really comparable to CS besides the programming part
Agreed, and I kind of wish CS and game dev weren’t considered so similar. They both program, sure, and those skills can be moved.
Go ask a Microsoft dev to explain game theory, hotkey availability, and UX. Then, ask a game dev the same questions. You’ll get wildly different answers because they wildly different goals
This is why the tradeification of engineering should be viewed with skepticism. An engineering degree should give you a strong technical background in computing, physics, math, and software without over-specializing. You are meant to learn specific tradecraft on the job.
Having over a 25 year career done development in all kinds of areas including gamedev, there is quite a big difference in way of thinking and doing stuff between anything with user interaction and server-side stuff, and gamedev specifically also differs a lot from the rest of areas of user-facing software because it’s very performance oriented, way closer to the bare metal than the rest (in smartphone apps you’re working on top of libraries on top of libraries on top of libraries, in gamedev you make GPU shaders in a variant of C which very tightly tied to the specifics of how that hardware works), and each game is pretty much a unique user interface in programming terms (i.e. there much less reusability, especially of assets, than in say web or smartapp development).
(I mean, in server-side stuff you’re for example worrying about transactional integrity during database access, system design for balanced distributed handling of requests or networked access to APIs exposed via REST interfaces, whilst in in gamedev you’re for example doing vector maths to project a user click on the screen onto a game plane in the 3D universe, moving the bones in 3D models to animate them and writting shaders to produce effects like a 3D model being consumed from the point of impact when hit by a shot.
Mind you, for me personally all of them are cool challenges (which is probably why I’m one of those unusal developers who is generic to the point of sillyness) but they’re definitelly very different, even in the kinds of architectural approaches used for the software being developed.
And that’s not even to mention security. I’m in a CS course right now, and sure we talk about cyber security and social networking and blah blah blah.
Go ask a game dev about their security patches and you’ll see the WORLD of difference in the two spaces
Oh, man, yes.
I’ve spent more of my career doing server-side stuff than other areas and it’s like night and day when it comes to IT security between server-side dev and gamedev, probably because server-side is networked and generally is done for much more important targets (valuable data and even actual financial assets of big companies, rather than an individual’s game state or machine) so there a big expectation that the best external attackers (and a veritable army of script kiddies) will be hammering at anything a server-side component exposes via a network interface, trying to hack it.
Mind you, I still bitched and moaned at the lack of IT Security awareness of some of my colleagues when I was doing server side stuff :)
And that’s exactly the thing, the threat model is so different. In gamedev, they’re thinking about those networking issues for sure but man oh man are they WAY more worried about RCE in those drivers you mentioned earlier.
Why? For the same reason Emacs is a text editor, internet browser, and Spotify client. For the same reason that “will it run doom” is even a question. Because their game got hacked before they even opened the first text file to make the game
That’s still pricey imo
University in Sweden is free for swedish citizens, it used to be free for foreign students as well, but since some years ago the universities are allowed to put fees on foreign students. Dont remember the exact details of how it works. Edit: looked it up, still free for people from EU, EES and Switzerland, and people living in Sweden with a resident permit.
I was around when they introduced it. They basically killed some programs because it went from a few students to none. Because why would you pay for a Swedish uni noone heard of instead of a bit more for a famous uni. It was a stupid policy.
To be fair, I see the argument. It is tax-paid, so you want to reserve it for people who are likely to pay future taxes.
Why are rich expats more likely to pay taxes in sweden in the future than expats who could not afford tuition?
Yeah, if it’s free for your citizens it has to be free for all EU citizens. Getting in can be tricky though.
Oh nice! Get yourself a permit!
Haven’t European schools been cheaper since like the 80s tho?
Yep
So I would think the brain drain would have happened a long time ago, like back in the 90s. Sadly, most of us Americans will just keep paying more and more for stuff rather than give any of it up.
It is quite hard to even get accepted to a foreign undergrad program out of high school. Grad school is a bit easier but it’s still difficult and traditionally there is just enormous amounts of money in the US academic system so going abroad really needs to be something you prioritize. Also many US grad students don’t pay tuition for PhD track programs. You get an assistantship with a stipend.
You get paid for doing a PhD in Europe, too. Also, teams tend to be very international, sometimes majority or even exclusively so.
So if students from third-world countries can come over regularly with few issues to live and work here, I wonder what’s holding back Americans.
It isn’t an active choice. Moving to Europe is not an option for most Americans.
Is there a reason for it or is this just internalised american exceptionalism?
Edit: There was a misunderstanding, and I was rude here.
Ok. I must have failed to formulate my question properly. I’m sorry for that. Let me try again. I know moving is expansive, takes much of time and is really exhausting. But the post talks about scientists. The little interaction I had with scientists have led me to the believe, that it is much more easy for scientists to move even across nations and even across continents. You said moving is no option for americans. Why is that?
I understand what you meant now, apologies. I thought it was a dig.
The person I was responding to said “most Americans,” and I was responding to that statement. It is difficult for most Americans to immigrate anywhere, unless they have skills/knowledge that the country they are attempting to move to is having trouble filling or independent wealth. Perhaps soon, we’ll be able to claim refugee status or political asylum, but I certainly hope it doesn’t get there.
The message “america is best” used to be shouted everywhere they had a chance. It might be bullshit, but say it enough and it sticks.
Then again, the scars that the nazi’s left behind are still visible. With how recent that was back in the 90’s I wouldn’t blame people for being careful. Moving countries isn’t a thing most people do every few decades.