The game industry... (Score 1)

There are two elements to getting into the game industry.

One is that everyone has an idea, so they're worthless on their own. What's worth something is being able to implement the idea.

The second element relates to the first, and that's that the game industry has become that, an industry. Furthermore, just like the film and music industries, it's becoming a hit-driven industry in which 90% of the revenue is made by 10% of the titles, and much of the popularity of the title is decided upon by the fickleness of the masses.

Game publishers work just like music and film publishers, they amortize risk across many titles. They fund the development of many titles each year, with the objective that a few hits will cover the costs of all the others. Because the vast majority of games do *not* make a profit!

So what's the secret? It's to minimize the publisher's risk. It's done in a number of ways, but the main ones are:

- Produce as much as you can by yourself. Create the technology, prove the concept. The more you have already produced, the more you have shown that you can hit the remainder of your milestones, and the more you've shown that the product has a chance of success.

- Get experience. Publishers reduce risk by betting on proven teams. People who have shipped titles on time, and on budget (and preferably profitably, but that's not always possible) are infinitely more valuable than people who would *like* to one day do these things.

So there you go. Read articles on the net about the game industry, and how brutal the entire sector can be. It's a big chain from retail to wholesale to publishers, and developers are but a small part in the whole equation.

Appreciate the risks undertaken by each part of the chain, and then look to how you can fit into their scheme to produce something which they'd like to take to completion.

It takes patience, but wouldn't it be nice to have your game on the shelves one day!