I believe that many of the students may have the same problem as me. After graduating, are we supposed to find a job in a mature big game company , or to have a start-up company to develop indie game. This question is worth thinking, and here I would like to show you some research I have done.
Activision is one of the largest game company industry with more than 6000 employee. Mojang is an indie game company and it has designed the famous game, Minecraft.
Activision is a company with very long history. It was founded in October 1979. Its founder is Ex-Atari Programmers, who were the world first independent developers I believe. For now, this company has 7061 employees with 38 studios and offices all around the world. Comparatively, Mojang is a young company, who was founded by Markus Persson in May, 2009. This company is best known for creating the popular independent game Minecraft. On September 15, 2014, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Mojang for a sum of $ 2.5 billion. Unfortunately, all the co-founders of Mojang has left the company after their stakes in the company have been bought out.
Personally, I think a company is like a big team, each member play very significant role of making the concept of a game come true. As I have mentioned, Mojang is indie game company, which means it has a small team and less human resources. While companies like Activision are always have structured teams to contribute to the success of a AAA game. To be more specific, Activision has three teams to complete the process of publishing a game. They are:
-Make great games team: art & animation, audio, aame design,hardware, localization, production, programming, quality assurance.
-Market & sell great games team: art services, brand management, public relations, sales.
-Support great games team: corporate administration, corporate strategy, customer support, community development, finance & accounting, human resources, information technology, legal, studio operations, supply chain.
After talking about the teams and roles from different companies, I would like to discuss about some featured games from these two companies. For Activision, they have Call of Duty (Over $10 Billion), Guitar Hero, Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Singularity, and etc. For Mojang, their best known game is Minecraft I believe.
To be a indie game developer, or to have a more stable job in company like Activision, is a very hard decision to make. I think depends on what kind of game you want to make. For example, if you have strong interests on developing mobile game, I think having a start-up company is a very smart choice, because with limited resources, you can focus on developing the game with several people. As a result, you can make a game with a year with comparatively lower cost. While if you want to develop the AAA game on consoles, I think it would be better to find a company which already has lots of experience that you can learn from. Starting from a game designer, with years and years hard work, you may finally become the lead game designer in the team and have your idea of making game come true.
Work cited:
Activision official website(2015), Retrieved April 12th. from http://www.activision.com/careers/teams-and-roles
Hi guys, although it has been a while, yet I still want to thank for all the comments below. I agree that it depends on what you want to do as a game designer, and the indie game company and the triple A company do offers different opportunities and freedom. And as a sophomore student, I would prefer to work as a indie game designer, because I think it is more convenient. When it is the regular semester time, I can still work on like a mobile game. For the past spring break, my friend and I, we had a 7 day-long game jam. And finally we came up with a educational game, Campuspedia, and we will have it iterated this summer and published on app store.
I completely agree that it can be very difficult to choose a proper career when you finally leave college (especially if you are going into game development.) However, one warning that I think you should all consider is that you’re personal contribution can be easily diminished at a larger company. It doesn’t matter how important the work you are doing for a project is–if there is someone above you to take credit, it will be taken. If your game is successful, all the profit will be going into someone else’s pocket.
I would say to listen to the words of Lucas Blair from class: put yourself in a niche. There is certainly the ability to make indie games if you do so. Make a game in an lesser known genre that can easily be improved, and see how that goes. Keep in mind that history has shown this to be correct; not even a decade ago you would have never heard the word “roguelike” used to sell a game, even though the genre has been around since the 80’s. Now, that genre is massively popular again.
I would also warn you about the lifestyle of the “unlimited budget” game developers; if you make an indie game and it fails, at least you can call it quits. If you make a 100 millon dollar game at activision and it fails, you have many, many angry people to answer to. There are no making creative mistakes at that level.
I saw this posted on RPS the other day, and thought it completely applied to this discussion: http://mrwasteland.itch.io/twwds
I think that large gaming companies and small indie gaming companies each have their own sets of advantages and disadvantages.
When working for a large gaming company, you probably will have less creative freedom because your boss and other senior employees will likely be in charge of making design decisions. However, it might be easier to develop games because the company will have many employees with various different skillsets. For example, if you are a great programmer but aren’t very good at graphic design, then you might be okay because the company’s artists will handle designing the graphics. In fact, large gaming companies likely have lots of resources and funding that would make your job slightly less stressful and more stable.
Indie game companies, on the other hand, are a bit different than large gaming companies. For instance, you will likely have more creative control at an indie gaming company. However, an indie gaming company will likely have fewer employees than a larger gaming company, which might result in you performing multiple different roles within the company. For example, you might need to have both artistic skills and programming skills to work effectively at the company. Furthermore, indie gaming companies usually have very small budgets and are constantly searching for funding to stay alive. Thus, any little mistake that the indie company makes could end up bankrupting the company and leaving you without a job.
Personally, I would probably look for a job at a larger gaming company right out of college simply because I want a stable job to pay off my student loans. Although, I would be willing to work for an indie gaming company if that company paid well and had good benefits.
I agree with Michael as well. While both of these companies focus on gaming, both of them are almost worlds apart from each other in terms of the type of games and the amount of resources it has to its disposal. While Mojang game Minecraft has been bought over by Microsoft it still doesn’t get as much funding for gaming while acti vision has a huge amount of money with deep pockets for new projects. While taking a loss on a game is not a big deal for Microsoft but they definitely don’t intend to do that because of a company thy acquired based on a game. While activision has and will be ready to take a little loss on a project if they saw a potential in it and the workers on the project won’t be affected as much financially as they might be in Mojang.
I agree with Michael, The these two company’s have very different work styles. Activision puts out multiple games every year as a publishing company. Many of the employees that work under Activision are working in their own studios where they can work on other projects along side the larger project that activision would want completed. The thing is Activision is just a large publisher with a large pocketbook who decided what they want made and who they want to make it. where as Mojang is a single development company now working under Microsoft. The major key here is that if you worked at Mojang and invested 1M in a game and it went under the company aswell as the developers would most likely be looking for a new employer. Where as with Activision the funds are almost limitless they spend 100’s of Millions on games every year. The element of individualism could be lost but job security would be better at first with the limitless tools at your disposal. The Major question is design freedom or limitless funding
It all come down to what you would like to do when it comes to making games and how much freedom you would like to have with what project you are working on. Indie developers certainly have much more leeway when it comes to what they can do with their games. They often dont have the restrictions that many of these triple a games do have and don’t often have shareholders or many other’s interests in mind. What these large companies do give however is a bit more job security. If a project were to be scraped the company will still exist and provide other opportunities. So as you go to decide where you would like to go, you would want to balance these traits and see which one you would suit you best.