How to get yourself a job in the games industry

R3D

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdwzvdZFxVM"]Eurogamer Expo 2012: Valve Software's Chet Faliszek - YouTube[/ame]

An interesting talk from Valve's own Mr. Awesome, Chet Faliszek, on how to get yourself a job in the games industry.

Bek

Starts at 3.45, tl:dr "just make stuff - and get it our there"

Really cool speech too, and excellent points. Valve are quite awesome.

ceebee

Great talk. Definitely the kind of mindset I would work towards in any endeavors I plan on trying. Post edited because late night posting does not equal sense lol

Shiskebab

thx,interesting video.

aivanov

@ceebee, while I agree with you - let's not forget that Valve itself started out as a massive gamble. Without Gabe Newell's Microsoft millions to buffer the development schedule (the first iteration of Half-Life 1 was not that great, so they reworked - how many devs get that chance and not screw it up, with everyone breathing down their necks?), it would've been very likely that they went exactly the same path as other developers without such a warchest.

While certainly a lot can be learned from them, I feel like it's always easier for Valve to say a lot of the things they do, taking cut of essentially the entire PC market as they do. Also the fact that they just buy out promising IPs/devs. They're like Pixar; they make really great things, but their constraints are not anywhere close to the ones their competitors face.

almighty_gir

Ceebee,

i think the big distinction to be made there, is that valve both make and publish their own games, they had the foresight to think that digital distribution would be the way forward, and made steam as their platform for distributing their own content.

this gave them the flexibility to say "we make what we want to make". because they don't have a publisher breathing down their necks making them work to impossible deadlines. they take a cut of everyone else who wants to distribute through steam now too, which gives them even more freedom to do what they want.

then you have the studios who start out with a fantastic idea, make it into a fantastic game, it's a big hit... and then they get bought by a big publisher, like EA or Activision... and that's when it goes bad for them, and for their games. because rather than cut a deal (as if they even could anymore) where their games are just distributed by a publisher for a cut of the profits, they instead have a huge chunk of control taken away from them in return for financial backing... and then it all goes wrong because the control that was taken away adversely affects how they make their games.

so there, i believe is the distinction. valve answer only to themselves, while studios like bioware now answer to someone else.