Australian Employement scene
polycounter lvl 11
Fllowing the shut down of 2K Aus, its kind of prevalent that our game industry is a little dry atm and I was just wondering what you guys suggest to us new kids on the block looking to get started career wise in aus.
Especially if we wanted to look into more AAA work later on down the line.
Especially if we wanted to look into more AAA work later on down the line.
Replies
mobile games
I'm not in Australia so I don't know what the mobile market is but I've heard plenty of Australian devs complain that there's a bunch of mobile studios. That leads me to believe there's a decent amount of jobs and a shortage of people who want to do the work. It makes me think of Arcade devs turning their nose up at console work, since consoles were underpowered and had a different monitization system they didn't agree with.
Not at all.
There are plenty of people keen to do anything. There just isn't the positions.
Are there the same amount of jobs? No where near it, but the previous work for hire model where we all undercut each other to the bone for scraps showed itself to be unsustainable, leading to hundreds losing jobs and by and large moving to Canada.
The good news is while that that base is different, its growing, and its more interesting.
There are also a number of small to medium size studios in Australia doing really well and many smaller mobile savvy devs.
Defiant
League of Geeks
Kixeye
Halfbrick
Gameloft
The flip side is many are fully staffed, or indies (like us) with less opportunity to hire due to just getting off the ground.
There are also collaborative spaces around:
The Arcade in Melbourne.
Home to a bunch of awesome teams, including the talented LoG peeps I mentioned above who are making Armello.
And River City Labs, here in Brisbane, responsible for many great teams, including 3 Sprockets, the guys behind Fight the Dragon.
If you can manage it, and have some like minded souls you trust then there is always going indie. I've found branching out on our own to be awesome..stressful and throught with pitfalls..but awesome.
And then there's Canada..oh, Canada. Home of a Government which invests in things over than coal. :P
http://www.gamedevmap.com/
Logic ftw
But do you think this is selling yourself short in a sense? I mean if your goal is to become a AAA artist, yet your working towards mobile spec art seems a little counter intuitive?
I suppose you could always work on AAA stuff in your spare time for when your ready to move on.
I'm just curious what you guys think.
the question is, will you move or do you want to stay? because if the local market has no AAA, why bother? There is no way this will change anytime soon.
The next question, how likely is it that you are going to move, right out of school? if unlikely, mobile might be your best chance to get a job.
you can still do AAA type of things in your freetime, even though it will be tough 8 hours of work can drain your creativity and might leavy with no art in your freetime. So you need to stay dedicated and willing to move.
A painter who only painted on one exact size of canvas would be considered strange.
Sure, but don't wait around for that client to appear. They only hire a handful of people around the entire world every year.
Why take chances when there are little to no chances for landing a AAA gig here in AUS. Still pretty daunting though.
https://bajsingh.wordpress.com/total-war-battles-kingdom/
It's not all diffuse only 400 tri models any more! It really is catching up.
If you just stare at the top rung then you're ignoring all the work you could be doing to get there.