This should motivate them to work harder not do the reverse thing, seriously if you put time and effort into becoming a good artist work will find you. If they plan on giving up its because they know they`re not putting in enough effort
My exact same thoughts!
As for the thread, this is a very interesting read, i wonder what the numbers are for Environment Artists.
I don't think I saw Mercury Steam (Madrid, Spain) on the list, i'm sure they have a few character artists there aswel!
What the hell, there absolutely are. What is the deal with this thread? I would think this should be a sticky somewhere. There are also AAA game companies in Czech Republic and Ukraine. 15 AAA game companies in California is most likely very low as well. Why not just go to wikipedia instead and look up each country/state and make a more comprehensive list first and then try to fill in the blanks with the number of character artists? Shrug
its not about finding out how many studios there are, its about finding out how many character artists work there. and no that is not listet on the wikipedias or googles.
so i don´t know the exact numbers, but there are about 4 character artists at crytek and 4 at yager. and thats is for germany.
for poland i would only count cdproject red, people can fly and techland, but i don´t know their numbers.
[QUOTE=Goeddy;1963553 and no there is not listet on the wikipedias or googles.
[/QUOTE]
Yes there are pretty accurate lists on wikipedia for each country of the game studios in each. Maybe not up to the month accurate but a very good starting point to what is out there at least. The next step would just be weeding out the AAA games studios from there.
Yes there are pretty accurate lists on wikipedia for each country of the game studios in each. Maybe not up to the month accurate but a very good starting point to what is out there at least.
i donno if your being a troll or what but the idea of this thread is NOT to find which game studios are where, or what positions are open... but...
READ BELOW
its to find how many character artists are working in the studios permanently.
i donno if your being a troll or what but the idea of this thread is NOT to find which game studios are where, or what positions are open... but...
READ BELOW
its to find how many character artists are working in the studios permanently.
How am I trolling when somebody called me out and said there are absolutely not 25 game studios in England? Am I not allowed to prove him wrong? The point of me posting was that many people were getting the inclination from this thread on facebook that there were basically no jobs available in games in general. Obviously, that was not the intended desire of the thread, but nonetheless that is what happened. I kind of like the idea of trying to figure out how many AAA game character artists jobs are out there actually, I just think it would be a LOT easier approaching it by listing all the AAA game companies first. Why is that such a problem? Honestly, most job related threads aren't even allowed on the majority of CG sites because of the issues that arise, so it was interesting for me to even see it.
Why not just go to wikipedia instead and look up each country/state and make a more comprehensive list first and then try to fill in the blanks? Shrug
www.Gamedevmap.com would probably be a better place to start than wikipedia. But it lists a lot of media companies and very small developers that do things like mobile puzzle game clones. So not all places listed would have full time character artists and a large number of them probably contract characters or have artists that wear a lot of hats.
The smaller puzzle game companies often have 1-2 people and a site and have a history of going under when those two people find some kind of full time employment.
I'm not saying its impossible to have a lot of AAA studios, but you can't just look at a list and assume it's all AAA development with a lot of full time character artists on staff, without researching it. You would have to dig through each company and write a lot of emails to get hard numbers.
www.Gamedevmap.com would probably be a better place to start than wikipedia. But it lists a lot of media companies and very small developers that do things like mobile puzzle game clones. So not all places listed would have full time character artists and a large number of them probably contract characters or have artists that wear a lot of hats.
The smaller puzzle game companies often have 1-2 people and a site and have a history of going under when those two people find some kind of full time employment.
I'm not saying its impossible to have a lot of AAA studios, but you can't just look at a list and assume it's all AAA development with a lot of full time character artists on staff, without researching it. You would have to dig through each company and write a lot of emails to get hard numbers.
How am I trolling when somebody called me out and said there are absolutely not 25 game studios in England? Am I not allowed to prove him wrong? The point of me posting was that many people were getting the inclination from this thread on facebook that there were basically no jobs available in games in general. Obviously, that was not the intended desire of the thread, but nonetheless that is what happened. I kind of like the idea of trying to figure out how many AAA game character artists jobs are out there actually, I just think it would be a LOT easier approaching it by listing all the companies first. Why is that such a problem? Honestly, most job related threads aren't even allowed on the majority of CG sites because of the issues that arise, so it was interesting for me to even see it.
you are arguing for something completely irrelevant to this thread.
read over goeddis post one more time. your reply proves what he is saying and what this thread is trying to establish.
anyways, instead of filling this thread with noise, people should post the studios and the fulltime numbers they have instead!
Everyone else is talking about AAA studios, you are including every studio regardless of their budget.
Where did I do that? I said there were approximately 4-5 AAA game studios in Poland. Wikipedia lists 18 game studios in total, so obviously I wasn't including non AAA game studios. And no offense to Goeddy, but he didn't list City Interactive (Sniper series) or Epic Poland. You might also list Flying Wild Hog which is a branch off of developers that left Project Red (I think) with an unannounced AAA game for 2014.
I think I came in in a huff and puff stage after I saw tons of students saying they were going to give up on their dreams after this thread spread like wildfire on facebook.
good, students that want to quit "their dream" because of a single thread on the internet should go and find something else to do.
Do I know you IRL MrPositive? You sound familiar.
3 at splash at the moment...I think ninja theory has 4-5?
good, students that want to quit "their dream" because of a single thread on the internet should go and find something else to do.
Do I know you IRL MrPositive? You sound familiar.
3 at splash at the moment...I think ninja theory has 4-5?
For the most part I agree with that sentiment actually, but students tend to woeisme a bit more. I don't know do you? I've been around. Nevertheless, I apologize for derailing the thread. Please carry on.
its not about finding out how many studios there are, its about finding out how many character artists work there. and no that is not listet on the wikipedias or googles.
so i don´t know the exact numbers, but there are about 4 character artists at crytek and 4 at yager. and thats is for germany.
for poland i would only count cdproject red, people can fly and techland, but i don´t know their numbers.
Crytek Frankfurt has currently 7 (not including outsourcing and management)
There are easily 25 AAA studios in the UK, I suspect the real number may be edging towards 40 and there are perhaps as many as 300 game studios in the UK total, as many are relatively lean and mean operations. It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realise just how big the UK is with regards to the games industry - hiring around 9000 developers in this industry...
EA have Crytek, Criterion and Ghost (Criterion now a skeleton and Ghost the new studio).
Microsoft have Lionhead, Rare and Soho (and additional games staff in Reading)
Ubisoft have Reflections.
Sony have Media Molecule, Evolution, Cambridge and London
Square Enix have a London studio.
Sega have Creative Assembly, Sports Interactive and Hardlight
Rockstar have studios in Edinburgh, Leeds and Lincoln.
Disney have Black Rock and London studios.
Codemasters have Southam and Birmingham.
Those are just some of the publisher owned studios - there are a lot more big studios, some of which have already been named; Climax, Frontier, Headstrong, Ninja Theory, Splash Damage, Rocksteady, Warner, Rebellion, Sumo and Traveller's Tales are good examples.
The UK has a lot of significant studios.
about half of these are outlets for QA and or customer support or corperate not devs, also some of them Black rock off the top of my head have been closed for years. 40 active AAA studios would be a pipe dream dude.
also the uk listing on wiki has games workshop on there so that list isnt even exclusively videogames.
The definition of AAA is fuzzy at best these days and certainly not the indication of professional success it used to be (that's why many of the old mid tier studios are gone).
If anything, aspiring character artists should be excited that the number of AAA studios are dwindling. They are making room for literally thousands of smaller companies, many of which make really cool stuff.
Interesting to know, I had no idea how few there were.. would have guess about a 1000 off the top of my head! I wouldn't be disheartened by it though, I know at ND we're always looking for peeps (ones who are flat out awesome, or have the potential there)
lol yea didnt know we had peeps from there on here good to know! my love of Fromsoftware stared with Armored Core way back when XD rarely miss a title!
Yeah, this thread alone makes me realize how many lurkers there are on Polycount, scary, but cool to know.
good idea on the list Jacque. At Compulsion in Montreal, we contracted our character art, so no fulltime, as our entire team only grew to 8 or 9. I imagine this would be the same for almost all smaller indie studios.
Just wanted to chime in here. I see some posts undermining environment and prop artists in a way that seems to over glorify character artists. Being able to create solid environments is a whole different skillset. The required technical and aesthetic skills needed are on par (in terms of difficulty) to that of a character artist. Same goes for props.
You need to understand sense of space, scale, lighting, composition, color theory, design principles, optimization, etc, the list goes on. It's a whole beast on it's own. To say that if you know how to do character art, you can do environment and props is a bit misleading imho.
I'll say the same for prop artists. A strong prop artist would have collected several skills to create props in a fast and efficient manner. He'd have his own kitbash library and could probably create say a rifle in a far shorter amount of time than a character artist could.
Being fast and achieving good results at the same time is an important factor to what makes a good artist in this industry. I honestly think there isn't enough respect given to environment/prop artists these days.
about half of these are outlets for QA and or customer support or corperate not devs, also some of them Black rock off the top of my head have been closed for years. 40 active AAA studios would be a pipe dream dude.
also the uk listing on wiki has games workshop on there so that list isnt even exclusively videogames.
I'm not sure what you're basing your information off, but none of the studios Ambershee are just "outlets for QA and or Customer Services". All are fully functioning dev studios - some with multiple teams, working on multiple games within them. The only exception could be Square Enix who I'm not sure are solely developing their own titles in house, but definitely have game development staff working there.
FWIW we have 3 full time Character Artists here at Rare (2 Principals and 1 Lead) and 3 contract at present.
So, from what I'm seeing in this thread, basically there are quite likely more people who have been to space than there are people working full-time professionally as dedicated character artists in our industry.
I'm not sure what you're basing your information off, but none of the studios Ambershee are just "outlets for QA and or Customer Services". All are fully functioning dev studios - some with multiple teams, working on multiple games within them. The only exception could be Square Enix who I'm not sure are solely developing their own titles in house, but definitely have game development staff working there.
FWIW we have 3 full time Character Artists here at Rare (2 Principals and 1 Lead) and 3 contract at present.
square is who i was referring to specifically im pretty sure they have no character art staff at this location not sure about any art staff for that matter. does the microsoft studio in reading have art staff? im unsure. ok so there are a few more than i guesstimated but really not many to say 40 is definitely out there, unless i have a more strict definition of whats AAA compared to some.
An artist's life has never been easy. If you can accumulate the finances to stabilize yourself when shit hits you(or if you are good with savings), eventually you become okay with the highs and lows. With ever increasing population of the world the competition will grow swiftly. But that also means that consumerism will grow too. These numbers are pretty low and that's coz many of the studios simply outsource modelling works including all kinds of assets (characters or props). Coz managing artists remotely is becoming easier now and more manageable too. Only the fighters will survive. But it's getting impossible to rely on just one entity for financial growth. Hence an artist now has to plan at least 2 things at the same time now to survive financially. All the best to all good people out there.
60+ 'Best of Show' Awards at E3 and you're wondering if you're AAA?
:S
i don't give titles, awards, meta critic and all that stuff much thought(just like making fun games/art), so i didn't know what AAA really meant, like racer is mentioning. we won some awards, but were a brand new company and haven't shipped a game yet... meh i just don't get caught up in titles. i don't want to derail the discussion to define AAA, but if you could define your criteria on what makes AAA to you, it may help decide how many there are? not sure, just throwing that out there. interesting information anyway.
depending on where we are in our project, we will vary our character artist positions. at the start of our current project we only had 2 character artists, then half a year later we got 2 more, and now that its about a year and a half later we're looking for a total of 5 or 6.
consider yourself lucky, you don't want to play that same numbers game with UI Artists
Why, are UI artists lower? Maybe it's my location (mobile games) but UI artist is the number one job I see available here in Seattle. I have no idea of the actual UI artist per studio though. I know we have UI studios here so I guess those people wouldn't be in house UI artist...
By the way, I think this thread is pretty interesting and I'm glad you started it JacqueChoi
Replies
My exact same thoughts!
As for the thread, this is a very interesting read, i wonder what the numbers are for Environment Artists.
I don't think I saw Mercury Steam (Madrid, Spain) on the list, i'm sure they have a few character artists there aswel!
I believe you're right, yeah.
at Quantic Dream we are 7 character artists
What the hell, there absolutely are. What is the deal with this thread? I would think this should be a sticky somewhere. There are also AAA game companies in Czech Republic and Ukraine. 15 AAA game companies in California is most likely very low as well. Why not just go to wikipedia instead and look up each country/state and make a more comprehensive list first and then try to fill in the blanks with the number of character artists? Shrug
so i don´t know the exact numbers, but there are about 4 character artists at crytek and 4 at yager. and thats is for germany.
for poland i would only count cdproject red, people can fly and techland, but i don´t know their numbers.
[/QUOTE]
Yes there are pretty accurate lists on wikipedia for each country of the game studios in each. Maybe not up to the month accurate but a very good starting point to what is out there at least. The next step would just be weeding out the AAA games studios from there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_the_United_Kingdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_game_companies_of_Poland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_Ukraine
i donno if your being a troll or what but the idea of this thread is NOT to find which game studios are where, or what positions are open... but...
READ BELOW
its to find how many character artists are working in the studios permanently.
How am I trolling when somebody called me out and said there are absolutely not 25 game studios in England? Am I not allowed to prove him wrong? The point of me posting was that many people were getting the inclination from this thread on facebook that there were basically no jobs available in games in general. Obviously, that was not the intended desire of the thread, but nonetheless that is what happened. I kind of like the idea of trying to figure out how many AAA game character artists jobs are out there actually, I just think it would be a LOT easier approaching it by listing all the AAA game companies first. Why is that such a problem? Honestly, most job related threads aren't even allowed on the majority of CG sites because of the issues that arise, so it was interesting for me to even see it.
The smaller puzzle game companies often have 1-2 people and a site and have a history of going under when those two people find some kind of full time employment.
I'm not saying its impossible to have a lot of AAA studios, but you can't just look at a list and assume it's all AAA development with a lot of full time character artists on staff, without researching it. You would have to dig through each company and write a lot of emails to get hard numbers.
There is the game developer survey that goes out.
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/1108/game_developer_salary_survey_2012.php?page=1
It's probably some of the best numbers we have on the industry (in the US) but doesn't drill down deep enough to satisfy a question like this. They lump character and environment artists under "art and animation".
Ya, I had seen that map before somewhere along the lines. And yes I realize all in the list are not AAA game studios. Good info.
Everyone else is talking about AAA studios, you are including every studio regardless of their budget.
you are arguing for something completely irrelevant to this thread.
read over goeddis post one more time. your reply proves what he is saying and what this thread is trying to establish.
anyways, instead of filling this thread with noise, people should post the studios and the fulltime numbers they have instead!
good, students that want to quit "their dream" because of a single thread on the internet should go and find something else to do.
Do I know you IRL MrPositive? You sound familiar.
3 at splash at the moment...I think ninja theory has 4-5?
For the most part I agree with that sentiment actually, but students tend to woeisme a bit more. I don't know do you? I've been around.
I was drinking mead last night and I think it turned me into a viking. Anyway, I thought you only cared about $$$
Crytek Frankfurt has currently 7 (not including outsourcing and management)
Crytek is independent and not owned be EA btw.
about half of these are outlets for QA and or customer support or corperate not devs, also some of them Black rock off the top of my head have been closed for years. 40 active AAA studios would be a pipe dream dude.
also the uk listing on wiki has games workshop on there so that list isnt even exclusively videogames.
If anything, aspiring character artists should be excited that the number of AAA studios are dwindling. They are making room for literally thousands of smaller companies, many of which make really cool stuff.
good idea on the list Jacque. At Compulsion in Montreal, we contracted our character art, so no fulltime, as our entire team only grew to 8 or 9. I imagine this would be the same for almost all smaller indie studios.
:shifty:
Ubisoft Blue Byte
Character Artist + 2
greetings
You need to understand sense of space, scale, lighting, composition, color theory, design principles, optimization, etc, the list goes on. It's a whole beast on it's own. To say that if you know how to do character art, you can do environment and props is a bit misleading imho.
I'll say the same for prop artists. A strong prop artist would have collected several skills to create props in a fast and efficient manner. He'd have his own kitbash library and could probably create say a rifle in a far shorter amount of time than a character artist could.
Being fast and achieving good results at the same time is an important factor to what makes a good artist in this industry. I honestly think there isn't enough respect given to environment/prop artists these days.
I'm not sure what you're basing your information off, but none of the studios Ambershee are just "outlets for QA and or Customer Services". All are fully functioning dev studios - some with multiple teams, working on multiple games within them. The only exception could be Square Enix who I'm not sure are solely developing their own titles in house, but definitely have game development staff working there.
FWIW we have 3 full time Character Artists here at Rare (2 Principals and 1 Lead) and 3 contract at present.
Here at Respawn 4 of us work on characters (as well as other stuff)
square is who i was referring to specifically im pretty sure they have no character art staff at this location not sure about any art staff for that matter. does the microsoft studio in reading have art staff? im unsure. ok so there are a few more than i guesstimated but really not many to say 40 is definitely out there, unless i have a more strict definition of whats AAA compared to some.
60+ 'Best of Show' Awards at E3 and you're wondering if you're AAA?
:S
gameloft Vietnam = ~12
i don't give titles, awards, meta critic and all that stuff much thought(just like making fun games/art), so i didn't know what AAA really meant, like racer is mentioning. we won some awards, but were a brand new company and haven't shipped a game yet... meh i just don't get caught up in titles. i don't want to derail the discussion to define AAA, but if you could define your criteria on what makes AAA to you, it may help decide how many there are? not sure, just throwing that out there. interesting information anyway.
Consider yourself lucky if you're a UI artist. There are so many open positions right now I doubt there are enough candidates to cover half..
ArenaNet 14
Microsoft Game Studios (?)
BlackPowder Games (?)
NST (Nintendo Software Technology) (?)
//Snowblind no longer exists. (Merged with other studio)
Are you sure Arena Net has 14 Fulltime employees? I recall they were looking for a lot of 6 months contractors not too long ago.
If so, that's awesome!
Why, are UI artists lower? Maybe it's my location (mobile games) but UI artist is the number one job I see available here in Seattle. I have no idea of the actual UI artist per studio though. I know we have UI studios here so I guess those people wouldn't be in house UI artist...
By the way, I think this thread is pretty interesting and I'm glad you started it JacqueChoi