Developers are often misunderstood. The gaming companies are praised for the content they bring out, but it’s amazing how so many gamers misunderstand them. We’re going to delve into some of the common myths surrounding these companies and their activities to help gamers understand what happens and why.
1. It Takes Years to Create a Game
This is wrong. It actually only takes a few months to make a game. This doesn’t include polishing time. The truth is gaming companies need to give themselves enough time to market the game. Developers will normally wait for a major festival, such as E3, to create a buzz via a small teaser.
Later on, they’ll send advance copies to certain magazines and gurus. They will continue to release trailers and teasers, as well as some extra polishing, to further ramp up the intensity. Most of the time spent between games is spent on marketing and advertising.
2. Gaming Companies are Full of Geeks
Sentiments like this only tell half of the truth. Small, independent companies will have the majority of their employees working on the game. They will be your stereotypical games developer. Bigger companies work in a different way. Most of their workforce will consist of researchers and marketing executives. The actual development team will be stripped back to only those who’re needed.
3. The Goal of a Company is to Make Great Games
We shouldn’t shy away from the fact games developers are commercial entities like any other. It’s not the goal of the company to make a great game. The goal is to make as much money as possible. It just so happens producing a great game directly correlates with making big profits.
Many of these companies have shareholders and investors they have to keep happy. A portion of the profits need to go to these shareholders to keep them happy.
4. Playing Games All Day
Games testers don’t necessarily have the best job in the world where they get to play the latest games all day. They have to step in before the alpha testing stage. In other words, they’re playing the same levels multiple times just to find bugs. They’re often playing games with lots of errors and bugs. There’s no time to enjoy playing games for them.
5. It’s a Closed Industry
Gaming isn’t a closed industry. If you want to join a gaming company and get involved making the hottest new titles, there are spaces for you. The problem is people have built up the gaming industry as this closed castle of secrets where only one or two people can enter every year.
The fact is the gaming industry is still built on advancement. It’s rare for any company to release an advertisement for a gaming programmer or designer. They tend to draft for these high-level positions from their own ranks.
Most entry-level positions in the gaming industry start from marketing or testing. Only then can someone go further up the ladder, and they still need to learn the skills along the way.
Tom Taylor is the brain behind this brilliant article. He is a technophile who enjoys blogging in his spare time. He feels Friv Juegos is one of the best website for online gaming and suggests his readers to try some of the games.
