Opinion: Game for a laugh

Posted on 30 Nov 2009 at 17:09

 

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As training incentives go, Mel Croucher thinks the gaming industry's open-door policy to nowhere has a lot to answer for...

What I know about the computer games industry can be summed up in the words 'derivative' and 'pooh'. In 1977, I set up what may have been the first computer games company in the UK, and since then there have been just two computer games - chess and ping pong (all others are variations). When I hear people talk about the opportunities offered by a career in electronic entertainment, I can't decide whether to laugh or weep, so I'll rant instead.

Let's start with the number of jobs available.The most recent figures I can get hold of reveal 3,900 people working for the UK's 164 independent computer games developers. Apparently, 4,100 more work for the country's 45 games publishers. There are also around 1,200 freelancers who earn enough from games studios to pay tax. I know there have been significant redundancies since these figures were compiled, so let's say there are currently less than 9,000 real jobs in the UK computer games industry. I can safely halve that number to weed out the administrators, managers and other parasitic scum. Of the remaining 4,500 creatives, I'll assume 10 per cent will be fired during the coming year and another 10 per cent will leave the industry due to death, madness or enlightenment. That gives us 900 vacancies in the UK computer games industry for 2010.

Almost all these vacancies will be taken up by university students acting as unpaid lackeys on dead-end placements. Because universities are just about as dumb as any other business these days, they offer whatever courses youngsters are willing to get into debt for, by popular demand. Even though there are minimal vacancies in the computer games industry, there are no less than 81 of our universities offering degree courses to prepare gullible saps for failure.

Here comes the scary bit. Only four of these courses have been accredited as fit for purpose by the skills council for creative media, leaving the rest to spoon-feed their students useless, pre-digested pap. They are failing to train the right sort of people for an industry that doesn't need them to produce derivative pooh.

Shake your money maker

This brings me to Train2Game, a company that targets people who don't have the qualifications, aptitude or money to get on to one of these university courses. For a fee of £100 plus £30 a week, Train2Game will turn you into a "highly employable Games Development Professional" with a starting salary of £25,000 in "a recession-proof industry". It will do this by sending you a copy of Game Maker 7.0, which is a nice product for creating derivative pooh games.

I'd hate to suggest that Train2Game isn't offering excellent value - other than to point out that Game Maker 7.0 can be downloaded from yoyogames.com absolutely free.

My advice to anyone wanting to have fun and earn some money in the computer games business is to stick two fingers up to the lot of them, forget qualifications and produce your own concepts. You have one huge advantage we never enjoyed 30 years ago. You can release your stuff direct to the public as iPhone apps - simply, instantly and risk-free. Long live derivative pooh!

Author: Mel Croucher