Week 15: An Introducton To The Game Industry

At the moment the video games industry is in a state where modern games need to increase in size and quality in order to match what the system can achieve and to meet expectations by consumers. This means that games that would have costed around 1 million dollars to make in the last generation can now cost developers up to 4 million. The increase in game content means that more staff need to be hired and each given specific parts of the game to work on, and as a result developers end up paying more wages.

One way of overcoming this is to out source whereby qualified game designers from overseas can be hired to create certain assets within the game for a much lower wage than staff in the UK. So the increase in game content doesnt necessarily mean more jobs for game artists in the UK. This also means that artists that would once be creating and designing large areas within a game may now only be given the task of creating just one small set of objects like ammo boxes, trees, so their jobs become less satisfying. Also artists are now required to work much longer hours because of the increasing amount of work needed to be done before the deadline.

For someone like myself who hopes to become a game artist the prospect of working long hours making boring assets for a low wage is off-putting. But hopefully having enough experience can lead to more rewarding jobs further down the line such as art director. and anyway having a job in what i would describe as one of the most exciting industries would be rewarding enough for me, even if the job itself isnt quite as exciting.