Mailbag 3 - Questions About the Game Industry - Extra Credits

[Music] wow how long has it been since we did a mailbag episode like a year that is way too long so here we go mailbag number three first up probably the most asked question in the last few months yes yes I do want to be a producer so how do I do that where do I go to school what do I study unfortunately there really aren't many production specific degrees offered right now but if game production is what you really want to do studying business and management or psychology is a good place to start but perhaps even more than any other discipline except maybe design you must do a standard management course isn't going to teach you anything about the unique field of making games so if you want to be a producer here's what I would do get a team together that's the first test of your production skills once you've assembled a crew help them navigate through the perilous Waters of making a game if you're at any major university there should be plenty of people at your school from every discipline who want to make games and don't worry if this first project doesn't pan out this is vital experience when you go out and interview

for that big production job you can talk about what you learned and how you grew each project you organize will add to your portfolio and when you have one or two under your belt Say by your Junior Summer try getting a production internship at a game Studio good luck next question can you do a so you want to be episode for artists or programmers or composers or writers or some of the other game industry roles yep we'll certainly be doing more of those the folks at stack exchange are already helping us with the developer one and we got a few other people lined up to help us with some of the jobs that are outside our areas of expertise unfortunately not all job types have much in the way of of entry level positions so episodes for Fields like writer or composer probably won't be coming in the near future what distinguishes a AAA game from a non-aa game are there double A games what distinguishes an indie game for that matter eh budget really if it's got a $60 price tag and a lot of marketing behind it it probably qualifies as a AAA game if it comes out at a discounted price or flies under the radar but is still launched for major platforms or by a major publisher probably safe to call it a double a game and if its development was largely fueled By Ramen or has somebody on the team who refers

to themselves as an aour bam Indie how do you go about starting an indie Studio Anyway by doing it seriously many people feel there's a magic barrier to starting a game Studio but there really isn't many incredible Studios began as or still are a bunch of friends in their basement or buddies in a dorm you can even do it by yourself if you got the skills again if you're looking for talent universities are a good place to start then once you have a game you should incorporate you'll probably want to be an LLC at first it's worth dropping a few hundred on a lawyer to get your company formed exactly the way you want it but Most states have fairly simple online processes that let you incorporate for around 200 bucks just Google forming an LLC and then your state name and you should be able to figure out how once you have a company start sending your game to competitions put it online hype it up any way you can just get it out there and get it noticed and don't be afraid of people stealing your idea it's very unlikely to happen after all most people want to be working on their own ideas and in the remote case that it does happen you'll still be in a better position with your next game to get distribution publishing and such now that you're established so yeah that's how you do it if conditions are so bad in the the industry why haven't

people started a union what can a developer do if he's stuck in a terrible work environment our industry is remarkably Union phobic I really have no idea why wish I had a better answer on that one but if you're already stuck in a terrible work environment but are too worried about not having a job just start sending your resume out there's no shame in jumping ship from an untenable lifestyle and honestly if people are putting you through misery don't feel like you have to make them aware that you're looking for other work till you already got another job lined up people change Studios all the time and loyalty is something earned not something assumed could you help me with my research paper or my school project we would love to but no promises we've received over a hundred of these requests just over the last couple months so feel free to send requests our way but please please don't count on us being able to help if we can manage to scrape together a spare hour we will but that seems to be getting tougher with each passing day even just keeping up with the inbox has proved pretty challenging lately sorry we can't do more loved your episode on gamification I work as a insert job here and would love to hear your suggestions for gamifying my specific field man we still get a ton of these and I'm really sorry to all of you who asked haven't received

a reply we really would love to address them all but this requires a lot of expertise in the specific field and a lot of time just mulling through the possibilities james' company Rain Maker games does this exact kind of Consulting for large corporations all the time but it's just beyond the scope of what we can handle in our spare time at least for right now maybe we'll do more gamification episodes periodically when we can steal the time to really research some of these areas that you guys have come to us with next question I'm Australian why am I asked to pay so much for games even on Steam I'm paying $90 or more why so this this one's sort of a mystery and I'm not sure anyone has a definitive answer for it so don't take what we say here as Canon but as far as we can piece together it's a historical accident normally when game prices are this out of balance in a foreign country it's because of some strange tax category or importation law that games fall under but this isn't actually true in Australia so as far as we can tell taxes and imports should have games selling at about $70 there so that's not the problem it seems to be the result of a time when the Australian dollar was weaker and tax laws were a little harsher which meant that game Publishers originally set a higher standard price for games but as the Australian dollar

grew in strength Publishers simply never reduced their prices cuz they found people were still buying games at a reasonable Pace at 1.5 times the price now again this is all just piecing together diverse data points I could be wildly off on this one but that's my best guess what's the point of region locking why do some companies do it and others don't honestly I don't think there is a good reason but in the interest of fairness here's the two reasons I hear most often first one is pricing especially in the age of Internet shopping it would be pretty hard to set different prices in different countries if consumers could simply buy the version in their language that was the cheapest so basically it's in the interest of continuing to screw over Australia and the second one is piracy region coding makes it at least a little harder for countries known for piracy to create pirate copies for other countries I really don't feel like either of these are legitimate points in today's world but that's the best I got how many questions have we got left who Okay clearly we need to be doing these a bit more often well since we still got a lot of good questions left to go through let's plan on doing another mailbag next week until then thank you for all the great questions we'll see you next time

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