the game industry

from my understanding employing people to work in the uk is expensive, especially in the games industry as it takes many people and a long time to bring together and produce one title. There is also the potential that for some reason it may not even sell well and cover the costs of the development process and there are people that say "AAA"  games,pretty much meaning expensive titles to produce will soon come to end as it is unfeasable financially for games companies. i don't believe this to be true as there is a huge audience out there willing to purchase these high development costs and not all companies make a loss it may turn out that either companies that are failing produce better quality games or go into administration.

companies like activation and rockstar games i think do make profits from their games as call of duty, gta and red dead redemption are so popular and it wouldn't surprise me if the new gta will make record sales when its released in September.

obviously games were not always produced by such large companies as they are today, these big companies are there ultimately to seek profit, although the people who actually work there are using their artistic and creative talents. Originally many games were made by enthusiasts that used their own free time to create games that eventually led to the forming of small teams of people then into larger and larger teams until you have today's situation of companies with various bases in the UK, across America and a lot of other countries.

rockstar leeds, one of many bases

after doing some research i found that only around 5% of products make a profit in the games market which is  tiny amount and makes me wonder how companies  that dont make a profit are still able to produce anything, also developers may work for years and not ship one title due to cancelations or due to a finished product not being shipped.

 

outsourcing is when a games company pays another company either in or outside of their country to produce certain game elements be it sounds or animation for characters etc. what this does is save the main developer from having produce certain elements either they can't themselves or possibly to save their team time. also a big issue about outsourcing is cost as it is potentially cheaper to get people in different countries to produce things as their standard of living may be worse meaning they don't have to pay them as much but to them it seems like decent pay. for me personally this could also be a problem because if a developer has the choice of me or someone in china and we were equal in skill set but the other person was cheaper to employ there is possibility that they would chose the other person as work can be so easily transferred over the internet that location is not really a problem but money is as many companies struggle to make profits from their projects.

after doing some digging on outsourced game elements i came across a website which briefly discussed a very recent game aliens colonial marines in  which the single player portion of the game had been outsourced, the result of which made this part of the game terrible. the developers reasoning behind this being they wanted to focus of the multiplayer aspect of the game. this goes to show that outsourcing games isn't always the best answer even if it is cheaper to develop as it proved detrimental to the quality of this game.

overall the games industry is a very unstable and volatile market to work in which i suppose brings up the question of why work in the industry at all but then again demand is out there for games and if all the current companies were to vanish tomorrow i can guarantee and new company would be set up in days, i think some development companies need to find the right mix between getting the right people to produce the games thinking of quality and not production cost and also execute good ideas well and not releasing risky/terrible games. also games are so hyped up currently that most of the time they dont live up to the standards, duke nukem forever anyone?

 

http://www.develop-online.net/news/42305/Game-industry-too-volatile-to-assure-job-stability

http://www.craveonline.com/gaming/articles/204897-game-development-outsourcing-the-hype-machine-and-you