Many desire to create video games, but not many understand what it takes to create video games.
There are conversations that happen frequently within gaming circles. The excited gamer, who has thought deeply about what makes games good or bad, expresses his/her/their desire to work in the gaming industry. Often, people offer creative or technical advice. The advice is well meaning and often helpful, but a complete answer is rarely given.
The gaming industry is first and foremost, an industry. It uses methods of production and organization that are similar to the film industry, the publishing industry, and the software industry. To be successful in the gaming industry, you must adapt to the methods and structures of a gaming business. Ultimately, business executives control what game projects are initiated, how they are implemented, and ultimately decided if they are released to the gaming public. To be successful in the gaming industry, you must have a thorough understanding of the business of gaming. Knowledge of coding, game design, and other skills are important, but knowledge of business may be what helps you achieve a long-lasting and successful career in gaming.
The Scale of the Project
Managing a game development project as a professional game developer is often a shock to the game development hobbyist. This is due to the high level of structure and organization required for even a moderate level of success. During production of a AAA game title hundreds of staff members spread across different studios and countries work together to integrate various aspects of the game such as the artwork, the programming and design, the music and sound effects, and quality assurance. All staff members work together to meet a goal that is often a publicized and immutable deadline.
Publicizing a deadline creates an even greater challenge at the indie level of game development. The challenge is to properly manage time and money to produce a playable game that meets the requirements of the production and the goals of the company. Often times, poor management of a company leads to resource waste and company failure. Strong company management is often more effective in determining the success of a game production company.
What Working As A Producer In Games Looks Like
A game studio producer plays an essential but unsung role. Fortunately, the role doesn’t involve game design or development. Being a producer is more of a managerial role. As a producer, you have to ensure that the development team is able to effectively carry out their tasks. This includes but is not limited to identifying the team’s production risks, and ensuring that the team is able to productively work towards achieving the project’s goals.
Although managerial roles in game development may not involve game design or development, several tasks involved in game development and production still require management. Game development and production encompass game design, art production, sound production, as well as software and hardware development. Game development and production are large-scale projects that may require several managers. These managers may also rely on tools and resources such as Excel practice challenges to strengthen their spreadsheet skills and efficiently manage project-related data.
A game development studio is free to use the productivity and project management software of its choice. However, most studios use a combination of various software and tools. These include external project management tools, game engines, as well as internal productivity and project management tools. Spreadsheets are also widely used. Game development and production are still heavily reliant on spreadsheets despite the numerous advanced software and tools available.
Understanding Game Budgets
Budgets for games at all levels are huge by most people’s standards. Marketing expenses for AAA game titles commonly runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Development expenses for non-AAA games is still in the tens of millions of dollars. Budget sizes of this nature over multi-year time frames with long development cycles and numerous outside vendors creates an enormous financial challenge for a company.
A basic familiarity with game finance and where costs are allocated by phase and by producer unit (production, design, art, etc.) provides an advantage to an individual seeking employment above the production level. Financial constraints impact almost all creative decisions for a game. In the game industry, financial considerations touch almost every aspect of a game’s development.
Knowledge of game finance is important to all employees, from the lowest level programmer to the CEO, as each has to make decisions with game finance in mind. Understanding game finance is one of the most important aspects of a game development career. Understanding this side of the industry is often neglected by game enthusiasts. This knowledge will benefit game industry hopefuls the most.
Spreadsheet Skills
Spreadsheet skills are highly marketable in the game industry. They are valuable during the development and publishing phases, as well as post-release for analysis and optimization. This includes monetization, QA, and business development. People who know how to construct and format spreadsheets to create tracking systems and dashboards are appreciated and utilized in ways less imaginable as compared to the criticisms levied on less-literate colleagues.
The spreadsheet skills taught in structured challenges are valuable for creating and managing trackers and logs used by development teams. Game production is a challenging and complex process, and being able to streamline and simplify some aspects of the process through the use of spreadsheets is extremely beneficial to new team members and aids in integrating themselves to a new team and role.
The game industry is still relatively new, and unlike more established industries, there is not a singular, well-defined career path from academic/vocational training to employment in the industry. Many people enter the game industry from unrelated industries or roles and bring their skills, experience and knowledge to the industry. For example, people may enter from other art/media industries, programming, or other related services and QA.
This means relevant skills are less important in gaming than in other fields. The gaming industry isn’t as reliant on degrees, credentials, and qualifications as other fields are. However, there are publishing and production roles in the gaming industry that require similar skills as other, more traditional, fields.
What the Gaming Industry Needs
It is somewhat of a misconception that the gaming industry lacks individuals who are passionate about gaming. What the industry is lacking is the ability to understand and interpret the gaming industry as a whole. This includes the ability to analyze their target market, understand the gaming industry’s financial constraints, set and achieve production goals, and make tough decisions regarding a game’s content and development.
People who have the passion and interest in gaming, as well as the ability to understand and interpret the gaming industry, typically have long, successful careers in the industry. While the gaming industry is creative and artistic, it still requires one to be business-savvy and understand how to run and manage a successful business.
