Ask me about the Video Game Industry

[cbloom]

[ QUOTE ]
Any thoughts on a game company to invest in? Somebody that is well run and should have good stuff in the pipeline would be ideal.

I've seen you mention Blizzard favorably, who else is well respected within the industry?

[/ QUOTE ]

I am not a financial advisor, if you listen to me you will lose your house, blah blah blah. Most of the small companies aren't public, they're either owned by founders or owned by one of the big publishers.

Blizzard is owned by Vivendi (aka Universal aka Sierra) which is a mega French company. Not a good play.

Valve is a good bet, I really like what they're doing with Steam. Epic is well positioned to be the primary engine provider for the next few years. (pretty sure neither of those is public). I love MS but you can't invest in them without the rest of their business which is -EV IMHO. I have some smart friends that are shorting Sony (correct value is around $40).

Playing game stocks has become a popular pastime for day traders, and it's making the stocks do funny things. The markets way way over-react to game announcements. Any time you see a stock like EA (ERTS) take a huge dive, buy it up.

Nintendo might be a nice play but I don't know anything about their financials. Motley Fool likes Activision but I don't see anything about them to get excited about.

[JuntMonkey]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Cause again, unlike adventure games, there is clearly demand for certain franchise 3D platformers.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's the problem with platformers. There are so many well established franchises, that's what the customers want. For example the "Sly Cooper" games were really excellent but sold poorly because they weren't a major franchise; same thing with Psychonauts. To break in you have to do something really special, and while there is demand in that niche there isn't enough to sustain more than a few franchises (and even those aren't really huge sellers these days)

[/ QUOTE ]

Funny you should mention it, I just this minute finished Sly 3.

I was going to ask about those - I didn't think they sold well. But then why did they make 3 of them?

[black_drake]

When major players of Blizzard left the company, what were the general thoughts of it in the gaming industry?

And any chance you know what Blizzard is working on besides WoW or anything WoW related?

[cbloom]

[ QUOTE ]

I was going to ask about those - I didn't think they sold well. But then why did they make 3 of them?

[/ QUOTE ]

Obviously they made a profit, and it's cheap & easy to make sequels, they just didn't make the big $$ like everyone wants in games. The whole industry is based on trying to hit homeruns, partly because so many games completely tank (a lot of games just never even get released, or get delayed from 2 year to 5 year projects which multiplies their cost), the publisher has to make it up by having huge hits once in a while. If you told a publisher you could make a game that would return a very likely 10% profit they'd say meh.

[fluorescenthippo]

how many hours a week do you think youve worked on average?

[thirddan]

[ QUOTE ]
how many hours a week do you think youve worked on average?

[/ QUOTE ]

im an artist at a 150 person video game company...standard day is 10-7 mon-friday...during crunch or near gold it was usually 10-10 mon-friday and then maybe 8 hours during the weekend...some days longer some shorter, some people had sleeping bags at their desks and crashed at work...when i was working on a feature film it was similar hours (standard day was 9-7)...the amount of crunch and whatnot will depend on a lot of things including team size how early crunch starts blah blah...its a great job, but like all jobs in the entertainment industry there is a less glamourous side...

but like cbloom said, the company tries to make it as painless as possible by providing meals, food, drinks, and some other perks to make crunch as easy as possible...

[talentdeficit]

i disagree that programmers working on games are working on cutting edge software. a very few individuals are at the cutting edge of 3d engine design, but for the most part, games programming is a well understood design space with little room for innovation. about the most innovative thing to come out of the industry (from a computer science perspective, i'm making no judgements about the quality of the games) was GOAL, which was shelved because it couldn't be utilized to write yet more monolithic c++ libraries.

even if games were pushing the envelope of software design, junior developers aren't going to be involved. they'll be using the same libraries as their peers, implementing the same monotonous routines over and over. they have it better than the poor souls working writing J2EE or .NET intranet utilities, but that's not saying much.

[asdf11]

I'm finishing up 3 year computer science program at a local college (not the same as university, I'm in Canada). I was interesting in getting into the game development industry and was wondering what the best way to do so was.

We learned some basic DirectX and OpenGL in this program but I'm guessing I'd need more experience before trying to get a position. Should I be looking into another one of those specialized game development schools?

[JuntMonkey]

asdf, check earlier in the thread for the answer to your career question.

How is it possible that something like the location of GTA4 can remain a secret? Hundreds of people are working on it or know what it is, and it's highly coveted information, yet not a single leak...

[cbloom]

[ QUOTE ]
i disagree that programmers working on games are working on cutting edge software. a very few individuals are at the cutting edge of 3d engine design, but for the most part, games programming is a well understood design space with little room for innovation.

[/ QUOTE ]

[img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img] I disagree with this completely, and don't understand why you are compelled to post this. If it has been settled down it's only happened in the last few years.

Most of the fundamentals comes out of academic research, but those guys never do functioning real time implementations. The first ever practical implementations of real time 3d algorithms are pretty much always done in games.

There will continue to be huge innovations in the next 20 years. Any time you look at the real world and look at a video game and see a difference - that's an area where people will be working.

Even companies that do a lot of licensing still generally do their own AI, animation system, path finding, & lots of other things where people are doing lots of innovating.

Sure you need a lot of coders doing relatively simple tasks, but even those guys have the opportunity to move into more interesting work very easily if they have the talent and desire.