What are the pros and cons of being a video game designer? Is it a worthwhile career path?
The video game industry is more than 50 years old now. And it is one of the world’s largest entertainment industries, with a market size of over $200 billion and 3.32 billion active gamers worldwide. Gaming has also given birth to some of the most well-known game designers, from Metal Gear’s Hideo Kojima to Valve’s Gabe Newell. Today, it continues to offer career opportunities that contribute to the design of interactive systems with the right mix of creativity and technical skills.
However, is video game designer a good career? The truth is, many people still underestimate the amount of work and risk involved in designing games. As with any profession across the gaming space or any other industry, it has its fair share of benefits and drawbacks. Before committing to studying or pouring time into meeting the qualifications, understanding the pros and cons of becoming a video game designer is a must. Knowing this sets the stage for evaluating whether the career aligns with your ambitions, which this guide will address by outlining the role’s core responsibilities, advantages, and drawbacks.
What Does a Video Game Designer Do?
To fully comprehend the pros and cons of being a video game designer, one must understand the role. At its core, a video game designer is responsible for creating the structure of gameplay systems, including mechanics, difficulty, progression systems, feedback mechanisms, goals and objectives, and player interactions. Their role centers on generating ideas and concepts that make up unique and engaging games and shaping the player experience.
Game designer Lucas Pope’s work in the game Return of the Obra Dinn has been generally well-received by the gaming community. Instead of traditional investigation mechanics, he built a deduction-based system where players don’t get clues or special devices, just limited information and the challenge of doing the reasoning themselves by analyzing the frozen scenes and audio cues.
As mentioned by one player, “I have never played a game that makes me feel more like an actual investigator. Return of the Obra Dinn is the best detective game I have ever played.”
It shows how meticulous a game designer’s work is. In practice, they carefully structure information density so players can form logical conclusions without explicit guidance. This ensures that the system rewards observation and reasoning, enhancing player immersion.
Exploring the Pros and Cons of Being a Video Game Designer
Understanding the pros and cons of being a video game designer requires looking beyond surface-level perks and challenges. One should examine how the role operates in real-world production environments to meet technical, business, and player experience requirements.
Pros of Being a Video Game Designer: What are the Benefits of being a Video Game Designer?
- Passion into a Stable Career
Many designers got their start from having gaming as a hobby that turned into a love of creating small prototypes or mods. Then transitioned into structured studio roles, contributing to shipped titles. As the game industry continues to grow, demand exists across studios, even in non-gaming companies. This offers lucrative career opportunities where designers contribute to production pipelines and ship playable systems.
In practice, this means working on features such as seasonal updates for live-service games like Apex Legends or creating content for ad campaigns or movies.
- Creative Expression and Cross-Disciplinary Work
Game designers heavily draw on their imagination and creativity to create game characters, mechanics, narratives, and worlds that people are meant to enjoy. These creative ideas must also align with technical constraints, performance limitations, and timelines. That’s why designers get the chance to collaborate with programmers, artists, and producers to bring systems to life, where they also learn something new to improve their work and access career advancements.
For instance, a game designer working on games like Portal 2 may be tasked with proposing an engaging puzzle mechanic for a specific level. But it must also be adjusted based on engineering feasibility or animation constraints. In turn, the workflow shapes creativity through collaboration rather than isolated decision-making.
- Flexible Working Setup
Being a game designer doesn’t necessarily mean working full-time in a studio inside a typical game designer work environment. In reality, some people pursue independent careers, allowing them to create games based on their unique vision. Likewise, some designers work part-time to pursue other passions or to balance their schedules across multiple studios. Depending on the studio and project type, work can also be either entirely on-site, fully remote, or hybrid.
This is evident in ConcernedApe’s solo development of Stardew Valley and Electronic Arts’ support of hybrid work setups, in which employees only need to render at least 3 days of office work.
- Competitive Salary and Tangible Results
According to Glassdoor data, the average salary for a game designer in the United States ranges from $74,000 to $134,000, depending on experience, studio, and location. At the same time, game designers can see and interact with the product they produce, such as playing the actual video game, having their name in the credits, or receiving high ratings and positive reviews from players and critics.
For game designers like Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto, who worked on The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the perks did not only include stable pay or bonuses typical of top-tier Japanese tech corporations; their work also remains a widely recognized example of long-term impact in game design.
- Multiple Entry Paths
Unlike other professional careers, there is no single route into game design. Many designers get in through a formal degree at game design schools, self-directed learning with online courses or tutorials, or by advancing from adjacent roles like quality assurance tester.
Typically, AAA studios like Ubisoft or indie companies like Team Cherry may evaluate candidates based on gameplay loop and rapid prototyping abilities rather than pure theoretical knowledge.
Cons of Being a Video Game Designer: What are the Drawbacks of this Career?
- Highly-Competitive Field
Opportunities for game designers have expanded, especially as the video game industry began raking in billions in revenue. But that also increased the need for highly skilled game designers and the number of people vying for the same positions. With today’s competitive hiring pool, candidates will need more than ideas and degrees or certifications. They’ll have to demonstrate practical abilities through playable prototypes, system documentation, and, sometimes, complete design tests.
In modern hiring processes, applicants will need to showcase a strong portfolio that includes working prototypes of games, or be asked to analyze a game system, such as how the economy in Stardew Valley works or what would happen if the jump mechanic in Super Mario were removed.
- Long Hours of Work
Standard 40-hour workweeks exist. However, tight deadlines and demanding tasks are part of the job’s nature. There will be instances when a game designer will have to work extended hours, known as the crunch period, to deliver vertical slices, alpha builds, or game updates to align with release schedules.
This can be seen in CD Projekt Red’s adjustment during the development of Cyberpunk 2077. To meet a November 2020 release date, the team had to require its employees to work overtime, which amounted to one extra day each week. Although practices have been implemented to mitigate this, it still happens throughout the industry.
- Possible Creative Differences
Although game designers have the liberty to make creative choices, the final design decisions would still be influenced by team structures, production leads, and business priorities. And that situation can, at some point, lead to creative differences. A designer can be fully invested in an idea, but it may still be altered or rejected due to technical feasibility or budget constraints.
Blizzard Entertainment essentially encountered this concern with Diablo III. Director Jay Wilson said the auction house feature is hurting all levels of play, as it has made money a more central focus and item rewards meaningless. As a response, they were open to removing it or finding more viable options. It demonstrates how design decisions are often adjusted or removed based on system impact, player behavior, and business priorities.
- Uncertainty in Independent Path
While it’s true that ultimate creative freedom is possible in solo development, it’s riskier. At major studios, pay is guaranteed, and the job is more stable. On the other hand, an independent game design career can suffer from lower pay or even zero income until the game is published and starts making a profit. Apart from this, most solo designers don’t have the budget to actually begin a project.
Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, went through this process. During the game’s development, he didn’t have the resources to start, so he launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds. While it worked for him, instances can vary depending on how promising a project is and how many people are willing to support it.
Is Video Game Designer a Good Career?
So, considering the pros and cons of being a video game designer, is video game designer a good career?
A game designer working on Valorant at Riot Games is responsible for defining competitive systems that reward long-term investment, working with analysts, engineers, design leadership, and product managers to keep all systems in line with the vision, and contributing to a live-service development environment.
From this, it can be said that the career offers strong opportunities to those who can balance creativity with system-level thinking while managing the demands of iterative development and collaborative workflows. As such, weighing the benefits of being a video game designer and its challenges boils down to how well you align with the realities of the role.
