Do you love playing games? Do you want to make games? You may love games, but think about this perspective provided by John Williamson, President of Zombie Studios. “Too many applicants think we just sit here and play Halo all day and eat free snickers and drink Dr. Pepper. The hours are long. The entry pay isn’t as great as you think. The job stability isn’t there….and you don’t get to make your game, you are making someone else’s game and you have to play that game every day for two years while it is broken. It really is a Faustian bargain…but I wouldn’t trade this for anything. I get paid to do stuff that I used to be happy doing for free.”

Game Industry Background
The video game industry is relatively young, but then again so is the entire computer industry. In the beginning, the industry was dominated by coin-operated arcade games. Now the emphasis is on personal (rather than communal) gaming hardware, such as Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox 360, Sony’s PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, Nintendo’s Gamecube and Wii, and the PC for the home, and Sony’s PSP, Nintendo’s GBA and DS, and mobile phones for the great outdoors. There are many game software development studios and publishing houses, ranging from those no one has heard of (yet) to massive companies like Activision and Electronic Arts. And the market is on its toes eagerly awaiting the next blockbuster game.

The video game industry is roughly $10 billion a year in the US alone. In 2004 sales of portable software titles broke the $1 billion mark while total software sales was upwards of $6 billion. Sales of console software, portable game software and portable game hardware are growing by roughly 10% per year. And hopes are high that the next generation consoles (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii) will innervate hardware and software sales.