Step Right In...

It's no secret, getting a job at a game company and then securing it for as long as you can is quite challenging. The game industry is still young and volatile, it's difficult to say who's gonna go bust or who's gonna stay to work on the next project. I have to admit I'm kind of nervous, it's a crazy world out I there's no telling what might happen to me.

Upon completing my course at De Monfort there's is no guarantee that I'll be hired as game artist straight away. Not only do I have to compete against my fellow game art students here and I also have to deal with other students and veterans across the globe. Luckily the course has taught me everything I need to know, the time spent doing the weekly tasks has considerably improved the quality and efficiency of my work and the fact our University has been accredited recently has given my chances a significant boost.

Actually the accreditation is quite an important thing to talk about. As far as I'm aware De Monfort is the only Uni in England that has been given accreditation. Basically what this means is that the industry has recognised that our course has produced students whose work is at the industry level. Its great knowing that we have been recognised for our great work, except the university seems to have other ideas. From what I understand some of the big-wigs have been using our work and other bits and bobs related to our course to promote other art courses and leaving us in the dust. What's more disturbing is that no credit has been given to our tutors who went through the trouble of getting this course where it is now.

Enough of that, back to the game industry. Now there's a funny thing about the current state of this industry. As it stands there are two distinct parts, one being the AAA developers and the other being the smaller app games and web games which are simple and cheap. While the indie devs is another part of the industry their significance is completely overshadowed by the two mentioned earlier in terms of sales and revenue. As much as I hate to admit it but those cheap to make games on the app stores such as Angry Birds has a big role as to how the industry going to move forward. I don't know exactly how much but the developers of Angry Birds have made a shit tonne of cash and I'm getting the feeling that the AAA developers and publishers are thinking along the lines "Holy crap, they're earning so much for doing so little. Why are we still spending so much time and money doing what we do normally when we could be doing what their doing". It's not going to be surprising that some of the big publishers are going to attempt to produce games for the app stores in the future, however that's not to say they're going to abandon the AAA games entirely. The way I see things as long as there is the demand for the AAA games they will produce them, especially if games like Call of Duty is getting stupidly high sales figures each time.

So it's entirely possible for me to end up working for a company who produces those app games. Heck, with that kind of money involved there's no way I'd pass up that opportunity. It'd just be a shame that most of the hard work put into completing my course would go to waste.