I imagine many of you will have done what I have done and sat up excited at a new movie trailer being promoted in the ad break before your favourite TV show only to realise it's not a movie at all but a game. How is that possible this you might ask? Games don't have the same allure as Hollywood surely - Hollywood is where all the glamour and money is. You couldn't be more wrong! Games has got sexy and has captured the global imagination. How else would you explain twitch with its community of 45 million (Amazon paid $970 million to buy it)? More importantly the movie industry is starting to look like an "also-ran" compared to games in terms of how much money it generates. Global revenue from Games overtook that of the movie industry some years ago. In 2013 it was double (Movie Industry $35.9b vs Gaming $70.4b) and the trend favours the Games industry:
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What has led to this success?
The clearest change has been the growth of social gaming vs traditional console games. There is a general preconception of Console Gamers that the average gamer is a young man spending their waking hours in a dark bedroom with the curtains drawn gradually turning into some kind of Gollum. Clearly the generalisation is wrong but you couldn't make any generalisation about social gaming other than its all inclusive. My family is a typical 2015 example. I've been known to play the odd game on the way to and from work on my iPhone. I'd love to say that the only games my kids play are Maths related games on my laptop but if I'm honest they also have a bunch of games on their Kindle's that I sometimes need a crow bar to separate them from. My 2 year old loves grabbing my wife's phone and fiddling with the games on that. My Mum, when not golfing, spends a couple of hours of her retirement with Candy Crush every week and she's in her 70's (sorry Mum). All in all we are a typical family unit (Aren't we?? Please say yes). My point - games now transcend any preconceptions people have on age or gender. Everybody's gaming!
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A global market
Hollywood is the dominant movie market force but in the Gaming industry, it's not the US that dominates. Many of the big console games you'd expect to be American aren't made there (both the Grand Theft Auto and BathamArkham Series are made right here in the UK by Rockstar and Rocksteady) but even the European market threatens to be dwarfed by the market in Asia which is booming. The darling of last weeks E3 expo in the US was Unravel http://www.unravelgame.com/en_GB.html created by a company in the North of Sweden. It's a global industry but interestingly Coldwood, who make Unravel, demonstrate another element of the market and that is size doesn't matter. Take a look at Unravel - it's a thing of beauty created by a 14 person team. Rovio wasn't the scale they are now when Angry Birds first hit the (very) small screen.
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Why would this be a good career?
Let's keep it simple:
The industry is booming.
The product is often a thing of beauty enjoyed by people across the globe.
Age is irrelevant - a lot of the tech is new meaning that someone with 10 years of experience doesn't necessarily have an advantage over someone with 2 years.
It's a global market. Our core business is placing candidates from across the globe in other countries across the globe. We are talking the UK, German France, Nordics, China, Vietnam, Thailand, UAE to name but a few of the locations we are currently operating in.
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What can you do about it?
Come speak to us about the games industry. Development is dominated by C#, C++ and Unity skills. We also hire producers, artists, animators, analytics and BI consultants and a whole host of other skills many of which aren't pure technical skills
Mail us: gamesjobs@skillsearch.com
Call us: +44 172 287 007
Find us: www.skillsearch.com
Follow Skillsearch Limited on LinkedIn
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