I treated game development as a hobby, not a career. That held until I opened the 24 slides of Ali Adil Ali Al-Zubaidy’s lecture on Generation Alpha and game development. Slide 9 ranks game and graphics developers 17th by pay in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026, at $77,002 a year. I was wrong about what the hobby pays.
Two Slides Put Numbers Behind the Pitch
One shows pay, one shows play.
Slide 9 charts 2026 pay by developer role, with game or graphics developers 17th. Slide 10 is a gaming infographic: 80 percent of children aged 2 to 18 play video games, while 22 percent play four hours or more a day. It credits UNICEF, OECD, WHO and Newzoo.
The Rest of the Deck Lists Tools and Events
Activities appear; results don’t.
Slides 12 to 16 name four platforms: Scratch, MakeCode, Tinkercad and MakeCode Arcade. Slides 18 to 23 list activities of the Al-Ajyal Foundation for Technological Empowerment: do your:bit (2023, 2026), Raspberry Pi work, Game Expo 2025, Dar Hisham Al-Dhahabi and the Sinbad Educational Journey.
A deck costs less than evidence. Slides list events, not outcomes, and the $77,002 figure is a global survey number, not Iraqi pay. Al-Zubaidy’s own article says impact needs participant data and pre- and post-training tests.
I now read a number’s source before I repeat the pitch. Twenty-four slides read without the talk are all I have, and I did not check the infographic’s figures against UNICEF, OECD, WHO or Newzoo. A slide can sell a career; only data proves learning.
