The reality of the games industry

Work
Kevin McIntosh feels that prospective employees are often ignorant of how serious the games industry really is. He says, "It’s a real business and a real production, just like creating movies and television shows. There are hours of brainstorming, grunt work, testing and iteration that go into making the game."

Just think about how long some of your favourite titles have taken to come out after the initial announcement of their existence. The processes involved in designing a game, laying the foundations for it and then building it up component by component – the graphics, the audio, the programming – all of that takes a lot of time and the involvement of a lot of people. And all along you have non-technical people, such as those in marketing and public relations, involved. Developing games isn’t all fun and games – a point echoed by David Giles. "Most [prospective employees] tend to think it will be back-to-back gameplay fun," he says. "There’s quite a bit of that, but not as much as they probably thought."

Being a deadline-driven industry, those in the games industry can work ridiculous hours. They can suffer enormous stress. The end result of all this labour is a work of entertainment, sure, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the process involved in creating that work of entertainment is always a barrel of laughs for those behind the scenes.

And that, in a roundabout way, brings us to another important point. "Some new employees might think they are coming in to work on the next best-selling first person shooter," says Kevin McIntosh. "Often that’s not the case and most employees need to work on games they might not play themselves."

This is very true. Consider Tantalus’ catalogue – mostly a string of tie-ins for DS, with maybe a couple of PSP and N-Gage titles. Last year they did the Nintendo DS game Pony Friends. It was published by Eidos and the background image of the official page is a lovely shade of pink. With flowers. And cute pony pictures. Probably not what every Tantalus employee plays on the weekend, but it was a job. Just as there are gamers who finished Crysis and then sat around waiting for the next big genre title, there are gamers – little ones with pigtails – who want to play games like Pony Friends. There’s money to be made from those gamers or, more accurately, their parents. Someone needs to cater to that market’s demands.

Often, when speaking of the Australian games industry, writers will mention titles like Destroy All Humans!, Powerslide and Dark Reign, but the reality is most developers here work on tie-ins to popular films and television programs and ports from one platform to another. The Xbox version of Unreal 2 was developed here. We’re not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Or that working on Pony Friends would’ve sucked. But those looking to get into the industry need to realise that, realistically, they’re not going to be working on Far Cry 3 or Grand Theft Auto 5. Even if they move abroad – entering job markets with far more competition, mind you – the studios that consistently develop such titles account for a relatively small chunk of the industry.