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An Interesting Look at the Video Game Industry
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."
All in all, I'd say that most universities turn out computer science students who know how to program applications. Word processors and the like. I doubt that many universities take video games seriously because they only came onto the scene in my lifetime. Give it another 10 years and we'll see where things are at then.
"No wonder: Even while the economy struggles, the video game industry has become one of the fastest-growing forms of media entertainment:" - from article
Of course the video game industry will always thrive, just as the movie industry did in the 30's durring the depression. People needed an escape and those mediums provided the perfect way to do just that. These forms of entertainment will always do well any time when times are rough.
...outsold the motion-picture industry by a billion dollars last year, and movie studios and record labels wonder why they are losing money? Come on! I've always thought that it was an obvious fact that 'x' dollars only go so far, and if some kid chooses to spend his allowance or paycheck on a computer game, there's that much less money LEFT to spend on a CD or movie ticket. Don't forget, either, that even just last year video games weren't nearly so prevalent. There are a lot more choices out there for me to spend my money on, but (go figure) I don't seem to have any more money this year to spend... The times, they are a changin', and the dinosaurs will be left in the dust.
Yeah, I sound just like a million other people, but I imagine myself and all those other people will continue to say the same things until they no longer need to be said.
Everyone on slashdot has a journal.
There's sooo many people who would love to go into game development, there isn't really a need to specifically train people. Those who want it the most, will learn. It's hard enough to find a game job right now as it is, If we were spewing forth graduates with a BS in GD (Game Design) then what would happen.
... it's more fun than business apps, is mildly morally rewarding, and doesn't require 60 hour weeks like I'm sure a lot of game shops gave.
But I'm happy making educational software
Because there are a number of film schools in this country, and the market for video games is (arguably) comparable to the film Industry. There are also entire departments based on music and art. I seriously doubt that there's a market large enough for all those art students, but who cares? What if I just like art and want to get a 4 year degree? I think that's plenty reason to at least pay some attention to the video game market. Maybe not a department, but certainly a minor would be interesting.
There's a lot to making a video game. There's writing concepts you should know, art concepts to work with, physics concepts when needed, not to mention the fact that this all needs to be coded in whatever language is chosen. Some training _would_ be useful in this industry.
I would argue that a University Education in Computer Science is intended to introduce the students to a broad range of topics in the field of computer science, not something as specific as game development.
To say that Universities should offer training for video game programming is ridiculous.
The intent of taking Computer Science at University is not to even learn how to program. A person takes courses that teach programming languages in their first year and then after that it's assumed that you can program, regardless of the language. A person is there to learn about the science of computers: stuff like algorithms and design at the early levels of a degree and more advanced topics such as graphics, AI, distributed computing, etc in later years.
I would say that game development would be an application of various topics in to one. Software Design, Graphics, AI, etc. So in reality I think that a course on game development wouldn't be useful anyway because it couldn't get in to enough detail on enough of the involved topics.
After leavign university a person should be able to take their knowledge and do with it what they want because they have a general knowledge of many topics. Whether they apply that knowledge to writing an operating system, word processor or the next version of Quake is up to them to decide.
This is just my view of what a university education should give someone. For all I know other areas of the world view a university education differently...
my two cents(cdn)
A new feature is just a bug waiting to happen. And vice versa.
I would daresay videogames might even succeed moreso than movies during these times, especially when you start talking about massively multiplayer RPGs a la EverQuest.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Not to mention fundamental principles of game theory that you should know, and probably basic principles of AI that you should know, and probably other things as well.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
many universities not only fail to prepare students for the game industry, but still don't take it seriously ...and the gaming industry has prospered nonetheless. Let's not fix what isn't broken.
It's often useful to interpret present conditions in the context of past events. If you find that European History has no relevance to your current situation or your future plans, then I hope that works out well for you. But please don't make any important decisions that might affect me.
Oh, and stay away from me at cocktail parties. I'm sure that a conversation that never strayed from the intricacies of video game programming would be almost instantly tiresome.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Similarly, Computer Science should not be taught as a course in game development. A student that is taught nothing but game development will fail miserably if they do anything else. And, in my experience, students of so-called video game schools know how to slap down code, but don't understand the workings of that code. You probably couldn't give them a original piece of code and have them understand it immediately.
However, a student who is taught the fundamentals of programming and the basis of computer science will be able to adapt to create games. He knows the foundation and will be able to apply it to a specific task. Furthermore, they will have the expertise to work outside of that field, should they not get a job as a game developer (a very real possibility).
A broad understanding of the fundamentals and foundations of Computer Science is better than learning a specific application. A good programmer will be able to adapt and could probably end up programming a better game than the one taught to just make video games.
"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."
.. just the one in the dough
... is this hypocritical? NO.. to say so would be to assume that it's wrong to 'waste time'. Doing it too much is just as bad as doing any other thing to excess; doing it in moderation is healthy like many other things (but not all)
Ok..
-- better than what? You've given away your view as someone who thinks everyone should take gaming seriously. Everyone has the right to think games are worthwhile, or not.. oh what a dumb unenlightened harvard professor that guy must have been, huh? Just because there's a market for something doesn't make it 'worthwhile' or prove that Hawkins is the one in the right
-- I play Unreal with friends but I still consider it a waste of time
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Just because a school is "accredited" does not mean it will be recognized as a full education.
I know people who have gone there, since I live near Redmond. The courses are extremely focused. True, it is a limited scope, but there still should be a broader approach. I.E. Why are only programmers and graphic artists being trained there? What about the directors and producers?
Also, let's say you spend 4 years there and go to work for a company which makes games. If you wanted to leave the field, you'd likely already be pigeonholed. If you get a broader CS or Comp Engineering degree, at least you have other openings.
Just something to think about, before jumping "willy nilly" into such a narrowly scoped environment.
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
The article is comparing the Gaming industries total revenues with the box office sales of the movie industry. They're ignoring the huge video/dvd/rental/cable-deal/fast-food-promotions revenues that the movie industry makes.
That being said, I'm still impressed by the fact that the gaming industry exceeds box office revenues by $1 Billion.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Some brief googling reveals this comedian, who says it's his joke he did about 6 years ago, and it keeps attributed to various people.
Funny, yes. Ironically prophetic? No.
After reading that article on digipen, I was quite horrified to read that there are no arts, music and so on. In life there are the foundation disciplines, such as logic, reading, music appreciation; upon these one later builds the skills of interaction and communication: public speaking, writing, programming, social skills and so on. To totally immerse yourself in the pursuit of communication at such a young age (18) is foolish. I really am in favor of a strong classical education in addition to a regimen of computer skills. I've found, at least as far as I'm concerned, that I have separate capacities for learning in different areas. If I do two hours of philosophy and two hours of coding (C++) I am not nearly as toasted as if I did two hours of C++ and two of discrete math. What often passes for "focus" lends little acceleration to one discipline while the rest rot. A well-rounded, well-adjusted person is going to be happier, easier to work with, and therefore more useful to the company on the whole.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Betcha they're not truly preparing them for the hardest part of the game industry; namely, the 70-80+ hour workweeks for months on end.
I work for a Very Large Game Company, and the project I'm on was going along at reasonable work hours & conditions, until this summer... when suddenly the producers & management apparently realized that they had no chance in hell of making the ship date.
Rather than pushing back the ship date (can't do that, shareholders might get upset), or being honest with the staff (give up any semblance of personal life 'till we're done, cuz you're not gonna have any), it was the death of a thousand cuts, and always "just one more" week of grueling hell. (Followed by another, etc...)
Evidently, this sort of management (and I use that word very loosely) isn't at all specific to my company, but (from what I can tell) is pretty generic to almost all of the game industry.
Why? Simple: there are lots of people who really want to write games (or at least, think they do), and are willing to put up with subpar pay and inhuman (and, in California, outright illegal) work hours in order to do so; once you burn out a group, there are plenty more ready to take their place.
Of course, you lose the senior and more-talented people doing this, but for most games, you really only need to have a single version that sorta kinda works; maintainability is rarely an issue, and anyone who has buys current PC games knows to start checking for patches on day 1.
(And yes, I'm posting this anonymously, because I fear retribution from my employer.)
At several of the most recent SIGGRAPHs, there was a very interesting panel debate between prominent figures in academia, and people in the game industry.
Basically, the academics think the game developers are focusing too much on the here and now, and not really focusing on long-term research, and they are concerned that the increasing popularity of games will lead to less funding for their more long-term research programs. Whereas the developers always think that the academics are too stuck-up and fail to appreciate how they are being used in the real world, and want to see less of a disconnect between theory and applications.
As someone from both backgrounds, having made the switch from one to the other, I personally find them hilarious. I do agree that academia and the gaming world should work more closely together. Indeed, you are starting to see more and more papers in venues like SIGGRAPH being authored by games people from EA and the like, and the Game Development conferences are in many ways being more and more like SIGGRAPH, with paper presentations, etc.
There is no doubt that games, and related fields like movie animation, rather than stifling the state of the art, are fueling it. It's probably safe to say, that without games and gamers demanding more and more, SGI-quality graphics hardware on the PC would have nowhere been so cheap and ubiquitous as they are now. And, in many areas such as physical modelling, simulation, and interactive real-time rendering, there would have not been so many state of the art innovations as there have been now.
Game programmers, I dare say, are often the BEST at what they do -- writing efficient code, both space and time-wise -- VERY much true for the consoles, and even so for the PCs! Despite advances in hardware, game programming is probably the most difficult and more demanding field of software, and one that will continue to insipire future generations of programmers to do their best, rather than being complacent and writing inefficient "bloatware".
In short, the making of games has grown up from a backwater area of programming to a serious factory of intellectual progress. I look forward to innovation coming from both those in the ivory towers and those in the game studios, working hand in hand and side by side.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Programmers who can code games are a dime a dozen. It's game DESIGNERS that are so rare.
Back in the day, which is probably where most of the guys you all idolize came from, designers and programmers used to be one in the same. Richard Garriot sat down and WROTE Akalabeth and the early Ultimas. Sid Meier (arguably the first "superstar" designer) wrote reams of code for Microprose in the 80s. Will Wright coded and designed the original SimCity. None of the above are coders now. (Garriot is out of the industry now, but his last few years of work was in design)
I know a guy that worked on Daggerfall (ok, so that's not a great accomplishment seeing as it was so buggy, but damn it he was a game coder), and I know a guy that worked on Everquest. They're coders. They didn't have anything to do with the design of the games.
If you can code a physics engine from scratch, great. John Carmack can. But iD hasn't released a game that was innovative in its design in years. John will sell the [insert name + Roman numeral here] engine and buy his Ferraris. But when LucasArts gets it and writes Jedi Knight II using that engine, THEY created the game, not Carmack. Carmack didn't do anything more than build a toolkit for other people to use. In another world he would have worked on libc or the C++ STL or on a tax calculation library or in Core Services for a financial institution.
Stop worshipping the programmers, go and seek out the best designed and written games, and the industry can be saved..
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I'm not convinced it has to be this way. The problem as I see it is that every game is made as if its going to be the number one hit game of the year. Which it never is, because it looks exactly like the number one hit game of last year, and there are now 10 different titles that look exactly like it. The business people who run everything are simply looking at other successful companies and doing what they do--but doing exactly what your competitors have already done is a recipe for failure in video games (and probably most software) as the economic picture you describe proves.
The solution is to start making cheaper games that appeal to fringe, niche groups. The game of the year may require the latest graphics technology and oodles of expensive artwork and massive marketing push--but a great game can still be made without the absolute best visuals. How much do you think these games cost to make? How much do you think the Pokemon games cost to make? How many units does the average GBA game need to sell to break even? Cheap, successful games are possible, and I suspect we'll see way more of them in the future.
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.
I'm not disputing your main point here, but to me at least, there isn't much difference between free and $50 relative to the true cost of the game, which is the time I invest in playing it. I'm sure if I took all of my Pokemon or Grand Theft time and worked at something productive instead I'd make enough to make actual cost of the game meaningless. If you like console RPGs, I highly recommend Pokemon. It has the depth of PC RPG with the simplicity of the console RPG. The battle system is much better thought out than, say, any Final Fantasy game. There isn't really any serious story, but its pretty fun to collect and build up the Pokemon.