An Interesting Look at the Video Game Industry 361
Bamafan77 writes "USATODAY has an interesting article in their Money section on the video game industry. The centerpiece of the story is an overview of DigiPen, the only accredited video game university, but it also describes aspects of the video game industry in general including the explosive growth of the industry (e.g. Barnes and Nobles would've reported a loss without their Gamestop subsidiary) and how many universities not only fail to prepare students for the game industry, but still don't take it seriously. However, I believe things are slightly better than the days when Trip Hawkins (EA's co-founder founder) Harvard professor told him to stop wasting time with games."
Re:Heh (Score:2, Interesting)
And who is going to detirmine this? You? I think not. It is impossible for any government institution to accurately say when every single child will be able to tell right from wrong. That, my friend, is up to the parents.
I still stand by the fact that video games do nothing to increase (serious) violence in anyone. If someone was going to snap they would have done it with or without the video games. Worst case is that the game may have sent the person over the edge a couple days sooner than he would have normally.
But I could be wrong.
Games industry (Score:2, Interesting)
It's a macho male dominated industry where predominantly male ideas such as 'cars and guns are cool' and 'hit your competitor (colleague) before he hits you' dominate. The executives sell products to children which are antisocial, addictive and are rarely educational.
The people who work in the industry can be genuinely nice, and it is interesting work - but I didn't see the point meself. My particular company seemed to prefer to pay its staff as little as it possibly could get away with and the whole process of having to threaten to leave to get a pay rise left me with a sore taste in my mouth. I left before AvP was realised and hence didn't get a penny (not that i'd have got any money anyhow), or my name on the credits of the game.
Why should they take it seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
Taking preparation for a video game design career seriously is like taking preparation for a rock musician career seriously. At best you can argue that it's an art that people can pursue out of interest. Claiming that universities in any way do their students a disservice by not offering it as a career-preparation stream is very silly.
In both industries, you have a very small number of people who can possibly make a living at it, because you just don't need that many providers in the mainstream market. This is even more true with video games than with music, as niche markets are few and local markets are nonexistant. Anyone who *isn't* one of the big players in either industry had better be doing it because they like it, and have a day job that they're trained for, because they'll have a hard time making a living.
Video game creation also doesn't require as much specialized training as music. It requires a _lot_ of training, but most of it is the same stuff you'd get doing a CS major or 3D or 2D art major or a drama/literature major (depending on the aspect of game design you're targetting). The usefulness of a specialized stream of study is questionable.
In short, I think the importance of "preparing people for the video game industry" is overstated.
From the article: (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking thats probably mostly from The Sims, and Grand Theft Auto 3.
Then I read the next line:
The current video game hit, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, sold more than 1.4 million copies at an average $48 apiece in its first three days. That $70 million windfall easily puts it in the ranks of a blockbuster movie.
Also, There was a 2 issue article in GamePro about "Take This Job and Love It!." Working in the video game industry. Heres a link to the lo-fi version, search for the pretty oneTake This Job and Love It. [gamepro.com]
I interviewed at EA ... and turned it down.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Some universities do take games seriously (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't been there for a while, but the University of British Columbia Computing Science department head in the early '90s (Maria Klawe) was interested in using computer games in education. Last I heard she was the University's Vice-President of Research (but she was still doing her own research too).
Just a wild guess, but I'd be inclined to bet that UBC takes computer games relatively seriously. Being in the home town of EA doesn't hurt much either.
(actually, EA is based in Burnaby -- a siamese suburb of Vancouver, and UBC is essentially it's own town at the other end of Vancouver, but that's picking nits).
Anyone up for Quake 101? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The game industry... (Score:1, Interesting)
Stanford does (Score:3, Interesting)
Look where movies are right now. (Score:3, Interesting)
Based on my experience. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition to having several friends who go or have gone there, I also have worked (albiet briefly) in the games industry for a large studio. In general the attitude of the developers there towards Digipen was at best ambivalent. Once, while in a discussion with a few senior developers, the topic of specialized gamemaking schools did come up. I was told that they frankly couldn't tell the difference between a digipen/full sail grad (there were a few there) and grads from other schools in terms of quality of hire.
Regardless of background, the game studio I worked at looks for a certain type of person with several specific characteristics when hiring engineers. These are:
If you met their criteria, you're in, regardless of where you went to college. I don't think Digipen can help you with the above any more than another school could in terms of meeting the list above.
Re:Me too! Me too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Interplay for instance, is in trouble. Infogrames, is taking major losses. Capcom is taking major losses. Big companies, big losses, with different base countries of operations.
The fact of the matter is, the industry really --IS-- sucking right now, and probably for the same reason all of the other industries are. The economic downturn hasn't helped, but look at the high level of pure trash they're selling.
I buy video games frequently. Every week, even. But when so many titles come out that even I can't keep up with all of them (and I'm something of a fanatic) then you know there is a lot of them out there. And many of them, even big name ones, are pure shit.
Of course, there are some great titles, too. I watched many times as a wonderfully done title hardly sells, while recycled garbage soars to the top of the charts and it shows me that the industry is going to hell. Then the company that's selling the recycled garbage folds anyway and then everybody loses out.
We're going to end up with just a few major studios in the end, just as everyone has been predicting for years. Games are getting so costly to make, and only the really big names can afford to make them. To make matters worse, margins are shrinking, start up investment costs are now higher than they've ever been, and there's a really huge used-game market now that every new title must compete with.
Once upon a time a single title could easily sell into profitability just because a system had reached critical mass. Now days, even top-chart titles still make publishers nervous because trade-ins can dramatically cut the sales figures. Piracy is also a much worse problem now than it's ever been. Esspecially on the Playstation and Playstation 2, the two most popular video game consoles going at the moment.
Now, articles such as the one that started this whole discussion can talk all the shit they want about how much money video games made this year, or how much a single title such as Grand Theft Auto Vice sold, but in reality those are the rare top-chart winners, and for every title in the top 40, there are several more by the same publishers doing horribly.
Don't believe me? Electronic Arts knows it's true. They've known it longer than most publishers. That's why it doesn't break their heart to re-sell big names such as the SIMS, or anything from the EA Sports line. They know they can turn heavy profits on something that's relatively inexpensive to make because the majority of developement costs have already been spent. Everytime they make changes to an old game and call it something new it's pure profit, even if it doesn't sell as well as the original. And if it sells better, that's wonderful.
And while people who normally don't play a lot of games fork over cash for the latest Madden or the SIMS expansion, we have publishers of entirely better games struggling to stay afloat.
Has it become business? Yes. It's become a whole lot like the movie industry, and it's not better for the gamers in the least bit. In fact, you want proof that the video game industry has now gone to shit? Take one look at the people buying Playstations and you'll see.
You see mostly uneducated average joes that don't read much, they watch a lot of TV, and can't be bothered to play deep and involved games. And while there are some shallow yet fun games, and there are some mega-hits that both the main-stream AND the die-hard gamers can enjoy, the rest of the crap is pure rubbish. Just like the rest of pop culture.
And we're all guilty of it, even the die-hards amoung us. Have any of you ever played a Pokemon game? Do you truely, HONESTLY know what it's about? Do you care? Probably not. Given a choice between being given the next Pokemon game for free, or BUYING the next installment of Grand Theft Auto most of our minds are already made up. It doesn't matter if the Pokemon games are fun or not. I wouldn't know, personally, and I doubt many of you do, either. That just illustrates my point further.
There is something seriously wrong with the video game industry, and to the post I'm replying, no it's not going to thrive. It's going to survive, it's going to change, and it's going to destroy much of the things we once loved about video games. In doing so, it's going to become just another segment of Hollywood and the Entertainment Industry.
Having said that, the Video Game Industry isn't going to Thrive. It's already on it's way to being dead.
Re:Give it another 10 years... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, CS programs should be including at least a basic graphics course (3D Geometry, vectors, matricies, transforms, clipping, pipelines, etc...not Photoshop or Maya...though I've seen some good courses that have written shaders for Renderman, but I digress). What you learn in school shouldn't be what you'll do in the real world.
CS programs don't teach you C++, C, Pascal, Fortran, or even Java. They teach you concepts. Sure you may realize them in a language, but you're learning how to attack a problem. You learn how to manage projects, and a whole lot of other things, that aren't VB applications. You may be employed writting such applications, but your CS department didn't put you in that place. This is why CS departments most often don't care if they've got Visual Studio
Honestly, that object oriented design world that you're coming from is just now beginning to take hold in the gaming world. So often C++ was bashed for not being fast enough (and they were right, the compilers didn't do a good job), but only recently has component based design started to take hold. This is why companies are making money with physics engines (among others).
Gaming is a weird world. Games need art, more than they need code. I've found that art drives the technology. "We need this effect..." Well, that wasn't in the engine, so hopefully our well desgined engine doesn't make ti to hard to add that.
Unfortunately, it's a tough place to land a job. Everyone wants to work for a game company, and there are so many mediocre programmers out there. If you want to break in, write some code (it's really not hard), and learn how to write games. Don't sweat it, you may spend your first few weeks reading lots of documentation...you'll figure it out. Don't copy programs out of books, what do you learn? Take their application and make it better. Go code!
Ok...
Done.
My Little Experience As An Ex Game Company Employe (Score:5, Interesting)
MaxCha had 32 employees at it's height. About half of those people were the real producers of the company and the other half were the wanna-be-game-company-employee types who were barely doing anything, and mostly were assistants for the rest. We had a lot of interns who worked for free doing slave labor -- stuff like helping the marketing department, helping customer support, doing testing (playing the game for free and logging bugs).
MaxCha made major efforts to push it's game, giving away free shirts, stickers, mailing CDs to people all over, and even gave the game away for free with a rebate program, but nobody would buy it because it sucked. Those who did buy it took it back to the stores because it sucked. You can't get sales if your PC game sucks, no matter how hard you push it -- console publishing may be a little easier to build some hype with.
The lessons learned for me were invaluable, and I think it will be for the others who paid attention too.
In total, I heard that the company blew only just over 3 million across a period of about two to two and a half years, which is amazingly little for what was accomplished. I am proud to say that I was personally responsible for about one third of that because I provided all recommendations for production infrastructure for the online game -- collocation, servers, routers, switches, random equipment, $30K of RAM from memman.com (Thanks Jay), software, and services costs. Almost everything done (ALL sound development, ALL art, the box, programming, marketing, even distribution) was done in-house.
The story of MaxCha was that of a bunch of kids who grew up, wanted more out of their jobs than just being paid, got together, said, "Hey, let's start a game company!" And they all had their own idea of how it was going to go. The game ended up not having a design board because the founders all wanted their little idea to be the basis of the game. The result was that the game had no basis, no story, and play sucked. The code rocked, the back end infrastructure was excellent, our ability to scale up and support a massive customer base in short order was good, but the game was not fun.
No fun, no sales. Whoops.
I moved away from the Denver Metro area after the company went under. Denver/Boulder Colorado has a decent game company market, as does San Francisco California, Seattle Washington, Portland Oregon, and a few other random places. I even found that EA Sports has a sub company that makes sports games here in Orlando Florida.
It is really hard to get into the gaming business unless you have some contacts, start your own business, or luck out. In my case, I lucked out because I was not really into working for a game company. I was just looking for a way to get out of my old employer because they were about to tank.
The atmosphere at MaxCha was very loose on the downstairs, and business like on the upstairs. We had a two story building that was very small, but it was perfect because the CEO, marketing department, HR, and other 'stiff' managers worked upstairs as a nice pretty front. Downstairs was the art department, testing, the programmers, and others. There were times that people slept there over night, there was beer drinking on site, pot smoking outside at the park, and parties at houses every few weeks. The fridge downstairs had beer in it, someone had a pet dog running around, there were game consoles laying about, and people came and went as they pleased so long as they worked 40 hours a week and got the projects done. I personally would come in somewhere between 9:00am and 1:00pm, and work my eight to ten hours.
In a small company like this, individuals made all of the difference. Not firing do-nothings early was a mistake, and making up the work later was very difficult. Worse, the employee was socially entrenched and nobody wanted to be the bad person and do the duty to the company that was necessary. There were a few who fell into this category, but I was surprised that most of the people in MaxCha actually recognized that because they were a small business they themselves needed to take initiative on various things in the company and get the job done.
The failure of MaxCha as a game company was that the game released was no fun, and sales were nothing. The nail in the coffin was the fact that the game was an online interactive game that required expensive infrastructure. If it had been a stand alone title, they might have been able to put out a second game and get it right the second time.
Box art, packaging, manual, and physical product was great. The box looked good, felt good, and looked like it could be a good game. Code was really good. Graphics were a little heavy for what they were but that was because of the frame of the game -- players did not get to see all of the patches that added all of the stuff that was left out to make the release date.
The release date made two years prior was met, even if little things got cut off. That is apparently an incredible feat in the gaming industry.
IT infrastructure was good, which usually gets neglected in gaming companies. Everyone is a computer user and nobody wants to admit that they need one person to really support the internal and production network. They think they can throw up a Win2K server on the T1 and host all those gamers off of it. We got it right though.
Design at MaxCha was a mistake -- no real design staff. Furthermore, design is like a book. A team does not write a story, one person does. Giving away that authority was a problem that the founders did not want to do, and so they all tossed in their little features, but it turned out crappy. They did not trust one person enough to write the story, give the concept to the artists and content producers, and come up with the game design that ultimately made the game fun. The fun got left out.
Because design was bad, the artists did their best to come up with original good stuff, and they did. Programmers programmed well, did UI interaction testing, got the AI right, and documented code well. Marketing sold the game as being good for everybody and got the name out. But in the end, everyone did it their own way and nobody was responsible for bringing it all together.
Giving that ability and responsibility to the right single person can make a great game company, but it is hard to do that. This is why many game companies are self started.
Re:Give it another 10 years... (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, that is possible. I am willing to accept that people could be morons and take home 15 gallons of milk and a dozen loaves of bread, knowing there's no possible way they could consume that much.
But with an educated population that doesn't act like animals, it is possible to automate the production of all the goods that are wanted as well as the distribution of all the things regularly consumed. The hardest part is to get everyone to agree that they need to contribute to make this system work. But I think you will find there are many people who want to learn and contribute. As long as there is no class system. As long as there is no leader. And the social values are things like morals, ethics, freedom and education. It can work. What happens if you use our media system to promote education, technology/science and average everyday enjoyment instead of manipulative advertisements for useless products and the mind numbing shows to sell them?
Maybe you've just been watching too much TV. Our economy is based almost entirely off our perception of the economy. We invest and give and feel like things are good, things are good, evenone gets a somewhat decent job, and we have time to work on environmental and social problems. But when we're constantly under attack, hording and guarding our valuable posessions, we find less hand outs or opportunity, less people willing to share and give. And nothing but bad news.
How many of your friends lost their job last year? Its a thin line, but it is one we choose.
What good reason do we have to keep the status quo? School is unpleasant, education is poor, scare tactics used by the government should be getting old by now. We know more than enough about Iraq and the middle east. But we need to learn more about ourselves. Why are snipers shooting people? What about kids killing kids in school? At least there isn't as much racial violence as there once was, but the current environment certainly doesn't promote our well being. Perhaps our economy will improve through the trade of guns and drugs, but do you really want that on your hands? You want your children to grow up learning that our way of life is to start wars and sell guns and control people with drugs and media so we can keep them enslaved, hungry for sugar and money? What kind of life is that? They deserve better! And GOD FUCKING DAMN IT! We have the technology to do better!
The Real Story (Score:1, Interesting)
If you want to make games, I pity you. Its true it is a sweatshop industry, 70 hours a week, no extra pay. This is not a way to live your life. The pay is substandard and the work very difficult, and likely your company will tank leaving you to drown. Its this way because so many people want to make games and they get abused by the owners of the game companies.
Best to be a producer, they get to work 9 to 5, of course the ones I know haven't had a day of vacation in 5 years, but that is the BEST you can do for a life in the industry. Other than that, you need to start your own company, don't bother working for someone else, do your own thing. Thats how Carmack, Meier, Wright and the other greats really made it.
As to education, everything that you need to learn about video games is at all major universities, just got to take the classes. There are alot, but graphics and AI are the most important. Personally, I think you get robbed for 4 years at places like Digipen, I know many people who went there. Its training to be a galley slave, better to be the galley captain.
As for me, I'm doing a PHD in AI at a tier 1 school and writing fiction on the side. My Disseration involves technology that has game applications. When I'm finished, I might start a company and give you losers a job. Where you will sweat over MY game, making ME rich.
You're my Nightmare (Score:3, Interesting)
Artwork: Don't even know where to start. A fine arts major might be a good choice for concepting, but for line production, you need artist who know the rigorous & limiting demands of a variety of game engines (can your fine arts major push pixels in DPaint? Paint a unwrapped UV map for a 3D mesh? Have any conception of the memory limitations for for a texture set? Ever seen Debableizer? Build a human figure in 3D, rigged for animation, in 3000 polys? 1500? 150?)
Virtual Space: If I need my game levels to meet local building codes, I'll hire the architect. (I actually work with an architect, but he's a game fanatic first). Being an architect is a good start, but anyone with a good eye for space and a burning passion for games will do.
Software: Sure. Bring on those spreadsheet programmers, or the guy who's senior project was writing an ecommerce back end in Java. Pass. Give me the guy you lives and breaths AI, 3D, who rewrites a function in assemply to save a few critical cycles.
Good luck with your approach...you'll need it.