Why I Stay in Games: An Honest Look at a Game PM Career

The Question I Get Asked Most

People who know my background ask me some version of the same question a lot. You could be anywhere. Why games?

It is a fair question. Games is not the obvious answer for someone with that training. It is not the highest-paying path. It is not the most stable industry. It does not come with the institutional prestige of finance or the comp packages of big tech. By most external measures, it is a strange choice for someone trained to optimize outcomes.

I have been in this industry for over a decade now. The question has not gone away. And I think that is actually useful, because it has forced me to keep being honest about the answer.

What This Industry Actually Asks of You

Before I get to why I stay, I want to be direct about what staying requires. Because if you are reading this as someone trying to decide whether a game PM career is right for you, you deserve the honest version first.

Games moves fast. Not startup fast, where fast means pivoting your roadmap. Fast as in the ground is always shifting. Player behavior changes season to season. A competitor ships something and your assumptions about the market are wrong overnight. A feature you spent six months building lands differently than anyone expected, and you have two weeks to respond before the data gets noisy. The pace does not relent, and there is no quarter where things slow down enough to catch your breath.

The goals are real and the pressure is constant. You are accountable to retention numbers, revenue targets, and engagement metrics tracked weekly. Missing them has consequences. The business needs to work, and the PM carries a meaningful share of that weight. Every week.

And the pay is not big tech. That is just true. Passion attracts talented people willing to accept a different trade-off, and the industry has historically priced that in. If compensation optimization is your primary career driver, there are genuinely better paths and you should take them.

What the industry runs on is people who want to win for the players and for the business at the same time, and who find those two goals to be the same thing rather than competing ones. That alignment is not automatic. It is something you either feel or you do not.

I have watched talented people leave games and build excellent careers in industries that reward their skills more predictably and more generously. That is not a failure. Knowing what you need from your career is its own kind of intelligence.

Why Someone Like Me Stays

I went to Penn. I got an MBA from Haas. I was trained to operate inside structure: to analyze, optimize, and execute within systems that have clear rules and measurable outcomes. For a long time I assumed that training would point me toward a path that looked like that. Ordered. Legible. Predictable.

Live service games is the opposite of that.

Nothing stays stable long enough to fully optimize. The plan you made on Monday is wrong by Thursday. The framework that worked last quarter is the wrong framework this quarter. You are always operating on incomplete information, trying to serve players whose needs you can only partially see, while holding creative and analytical direction at the same time.

There is no case study for this. There is no clean playbook.

What I found, after enough years in this work, is that the structured training did not make me less suited for the chaos. It made me more useful inside it. The rigor I brought gave me something to anchor to when everything else was moving. And the chaos kept the rigor honest, because it constantly exposed the limits of what any framework could actually tell you.

The tension between those two things turned out to be exactly where I do my best work. I did not expect that. But it is the truest answer I have to why I stay.

There is something else too. Over the years I have received messages from players telling me that a game I worked on carried them through some of the hardest periods of their lives. A divorce. A job loss. A stretch of months where everything felt uncertain. Those messages are not about retention mechanics. They are about what the work can actually do when it lands. That is not something I was willing to walk away from.

The Unique Challenge of the Game PM Role

Part of what keeps me here is that this role is genuinely unlike anything else I have encountered.

Most roles in games are specialized. Analysts live in the numbers. Designers live in the experience. Engineers solve defined problems within defined constraints. These are valuable, deeply skilled positions. But they operate on one side of the divide.

The PM is the translator. You need fluency in two languages that do not naturally speak to each other: data, systems, and monetization funnels on one side, and creative intuition, player emotion, and aesthetic experience on the other. You hold both at the same time without letting either collapse into the other. You sit in a data review and walk directly into a design session and the frame has to shift completely, sometimes in the same hour.

That is a harder skill to hire for than it looks. And it is one of the most intellectually interesting challenges I have found in my career.

I wrote about the perception side of this in more depth in What Games Can Learn From Music: the idea that reading players well means understanding the emotion underneath their feedback, not the literal words. That post gets at the craft. This one is about whether the craft is worth building a career around.

How to Know If a Game PM Career Is Right for You

Here is a better test than any checklist.

Think about the last time a game genuinely moved you. Not impressed you technically, not kept you up grinding. Actually moved you. Made you feel something that lasted past the session. If you have that memory, ask yourself: do you want to understand how that happened? Not just appreciate it, but get inside the mechanism. Do you want to know what decision created the pacing in that moment, or how the team structured the economy so the reward landed with exactly that weight?

If yes, you are close to the right place.

Now add this. Are you comfortable not knowing? Because a meaningful part of what makes live service games work is not fully knowable in advance. You build, ship, watch, and learn. The players are always more complicated than your model of them. If that uncertainty feels like a problem to eliminate, games will exhaust you. If it feels like the interesting part, you might belong here.

And ask yourself whether you can sustain the pace without external incentives carrying you through the hard stretches. Big tech will pay you well enough that you can push through the parts of the job you do not love. Games requires intrinsic motivation. You have to actually want to win for the players, not just for the outcome on a dashboard.

That last question connects directly to something I explored in What Actually Drives You: what is motivating you in this specific season of your career, and is it durable enough to carry you through the hard parts. The career filter question only works if the motivation question is answered honestly first. I would read that one before you decide.

The people who build careers worth having in this industry are the ones for whom the problem itself is the point. The translation between data and human experience. The question of what players actually feel beneath what they say. The challenge of building something that connects.

That is a specific kind of person. And if it sounds like you, I do not think you will find a more interesting place to do the work.