Gaming tech jobs often seem like the rockstar positions of the IT industry, yet the gaming industry stretches far beyond the world of AAA releases and crunch mode.
The glossy adverts for game developers, artists, animators, system architects, world builders and AI specialists all promote the same can-do, high-octane culture. Yet there are thousands of development studios around the world that dial down the hype a little to offer fulfilling careers making entertaining products or games-as-art for mobile devices, games consoles or PC.
©Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Backing the industry up is a world of professional tool builders, from Unity and Unreal — the graphic engines that drive thousands of games, to rendering tool studios, motion capture providers, cloud gaming specialists to Q&A automation and localization services.
All play a key part in a thriving industry approaching its 50th birthday and there’s plenty of career opportunities to grow into this booming market. One that happened to be worth around $90 billion by the end of 2020, and is predicted to be worth almost $257 billion by 2025.
While series like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty dominate the sales charts and headlines, it should be pointed out that most games are for a wider demographic and developing them doesn’t require an obsession with guns. FIFA and other sports series generate huge sales, while LEGO titles of popular series like Star Wars have huge fan bases.
Join the gaming community
Looking beyond the crunch-mode headlines, there are always opportunities among gaming developers. While many experienced professionals jump between companies on a regular basis, there is a thriving hiring market looking for new talent, core skills, and helping people work remotely or to relocate to development hotspots.
If you prefer a more informal working atmosphere and the perks of playing games and industry events that are actually fun (when COVID is over), these roles could be ideal for you. Take the role of an online multiplayer engineer that could put you in the middle of a team working with the visually stunning Unreal Engine (used in the hugely popular Fortnite series) building an online gaming infrastructure. While this is a fullyremote job, there are plenty of interactions up and down the business to create great results and deliver your knowledge to others.
TLM is one example of the great companies where you can put all those years of gaming experience to good use (and your parents told you you were wasting your time!). Artists are also in high demand among the gaming community, with competition high among animators, creatives and visual storytellers looking to make an impact. This blog post is a great way to learn more about TLM’s game development process, their remote work culture.
Few careers outside Hollywood allow you to make life in such a detailed and dynamic way, with characters from hyper-realistic or highly stylized people to enormous fantasy creations. This is an impressive opportunity to create skeletal art that could be appreciated by huge numbers of gamers.
And if you aren’t artistic, there are also plenty of roles for behind-the-scenes tech and services with plenty of cloud and web apps required to keep modern games running, databases to manage huge amounts of information (think of all the sports titles with highly detailed player rosters). All of these roles require specialist skills to support the business.
©Epic Games
Game on for hiring
While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox X, and high-spec PCs costing many thousands of euros represent the state of the art for gaming, with mega-budget productions, there are also indie firms and smaller developers looking for talent to work on more intimate projects.
Mobile gaming took over 50% of the market back in 2018, with smartphone gaming revenue estimated at over $63 billion globally in 2020. As everyone on the planet gets their hands on more powerful smartphones, they are becoming the default way to play for many, allowing teams to create touch-centric titles and innovative titles that don’t require the years of development that big games need.
These wider areas of development allow designers, developers and artists to create groundbreaking titles with a moral message (Papers, Please) a social good (Farmville) or that feature audio as the main mechanic (Sound Shapes).
Developing a smaller title can be a great way to get yourself known in the industry and can help get your resume noticed if you don’t have that often-cited “AAA experience” that firms are looking for.
Whatever your skill set and ambition, there is a place in the gaming market for you. And with the market set to grow massively, there will never be a shortage of roles for someone with the skills and ambition. And, increasingly, firms are ensuring workers enjoy crunch-free careers, helping get rid of some of the stigma of working in games development.
Chris Knight is a tech writer interested in mobile, digital business, automation, IT, smart homes and gadgets — anything with a GHz pulse.
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