My "dream job"
I worked in the games industry for 11 years.

I started out as a tester for a “great in the Amiga days” publisher and slowly worked my way up to being a producer (project manager), taking in one hardware manufacturer, two small developers, one publisher / developer, one mid-sized and one massive publisher along the way (not in that order).

I thought the games industry would be a hot-bed of creativity and freedom, that people would actually listen to new ideas and maybe even give them a go. I was very, very disappointed.

My 11 years of the industry can be summed up in one question: “What’s it like?” This was the question the licensing manager of the mid-sized publisher would use 30 times a week. He would dump a game on the QA department (which I ran) so we could give an opinion of it and he could decide whether the company should offer to publish it or not. He would then ignore whatever we wrote about it and say “what’s it like?”, not meaning “is it good or is it bad” but meaning “is it like Command and Conquer, Half Life, Tekken, Virtua Tennis etc.” if that type of game was selling at that time, he would try to sign it, otherwise it’d be rejected. The company in question could have published Guilty Gear XX in Europe, but “it’s 2D, it’s shit”

Even when I worked as a designer, the producer would over-rule every new idea the design team came up with because it might eat into the time he’d allocated for getting the artwork just the way he wanted. The game looked pretty, but there was fuck all actual game there. He used to be an artist, you see.

I once did a game treatment (like a smaller version of a design document) for a team-based shooter, where you picked your (real-world) weapons at the start, had specific missions, would die from a single, well-placed shot and would be out of the round once you died – basically Counter Strike about a year before Counter Strike took over the internet. The head of design for a now-defunct, Sheffield-based publisher read it and just said “I like Quake, this isn’t Quake”

The thing that made all this worse was the slow realisation that this is the way that 95% of the game-buying public thinks as well. If it’s not FIFA / Burnout / GTA / The Amazing Flogged Horse Franchise, it’s not worth buying.

When I got made redundant for the third time in six years, I decided to get a “real” job. At the time, I couldn’t imagine having to wear a shirt and tie every day and do a 9-5 for some massive organisation. How things change. I now couldn’t imagine showing up to work in jeans and a t-shirt (on casual Fridays, I don’t wear a tie! Woo!) and working all the hours god sends for little reward, with the constant threat of redundancy hanging over my head. I can’t even imagine leaving the NHS.

I still get recruiters trying to get me to go for interviews for jobs that I could get with my eyes closed and would pay up to 50% more than I’m getting at the mo, but I won’t go back for a all the tea in China.

The games industry - shit it!
(ScousersPet, Mon 30 Jun 2008, 14:39, 1 reply)

They're all idiots
This is all very true and horribly familiar. The games industry, particularly the publishers that pay for everything, is becoming more and more like Big Hollywood every year, which is a fucking bad state of affairs for anyone that really loves 'proper' gaming.
(redcamera, Mon 30 Jun 2008, 17:19, closed)