Career Outlook in the Thriving Gaming Industry
Anyone with an interest in getting into gaming as a career has a wide range of options available when approaching this industry from a professional perspective.
With record revenues being generated and opportunities available across a variety of disciplines, now is a great time to consider making the switch. Here is a look at the prospects both today and in the future that the gaming industry has to offer.
Ample jobs at every level
The good thing about gaming is that, like other niches of the entertainment industry, it is able to offer prospective employees plenty of choice in terms of which roles they want to pursue.
Whether you are qualified to provide customer support for a casino site or to manage large teams of developers for a multinational software firm, you can find everything from entry-level positions that do not require prior experience to highly specialised, skilled roles that cater to seasoned professionals.
For those who would prefer to operate on the business side of things, games development firms and publishers also require individuals for everything from marketing and PR to executive leadership roles and beyond. This means you do not even need to have any inside knowledge of gaming specifically, but can instead transfer skills from other industries and still succeed in this sector.
Solid pay prospects
The salary you can expect to achieve in the gaming industry will very much depend on which area you hope to work in and the kinds of skills and experience you can bring to the table, as well as the size of the company you hope to hire you.
For games developers, starting salaries for graduates can start off at around £20-£25,000 if you are freshly graduated and hold all of the relevant qualifications. Moving on in this role, those in senior positions can make anywhere between £50-£75,000 a year or more. Studio directors and creators of hit franchises are even more handsomely rewarded for their work.
Salaries in other gaming roles are similarly competitive, even if you are not doing the actual work of coding the titles themselves. For example, if you want to become a community manager or a social media manager for a developer or publisher, you could make anywhere from £25-£50,000 a year.
One aspect of the industry that is worth mentioning in the current era of content creation becoming a viable option as a career is that game streaming has grown rapidly in popularity. This means that it is viable for some people to play games professionally for audiences of subscribers from around the world on sites like Twitch. While the biggest stars can make millions, content creation even on a smaller scale is possible, even if this is far less secure in the long term than a career elsewhere in the industry.
Future growth
One of the best reasons to forge a career in the games industry is that it is projected to keep growing solidly each year for the foreseeable future, easily outpacing music and movie production in terms of revenues.
It is also a truly global industry, with development studios set up around the globe, so for those who want to travel with their career rather than being confined to a single country, this is possible.
There is some potential for disruption, with the emergence of game streaming services likely to change the way people play and buy hardware. Even so, the core need for games to be developed and distributed will still exist no matter the hardware that is in the hands of players, so job stability in the industry will remain resilient.
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