Hi everyone!

I'm currently studying at uni and we have an assignment which requires us to seek advice from the game design community! So I would love some opinions or advice on the following topics/questions:

What trends and technologies do you think will be arising within the next 3 years and how will that impact the gaming industry?

What skills and knowledge are required to enter and maintain a career in games?

Can anyone recommend a 'professional activity' for me to engage in, eg a gaming magazine I can subscribe to or a free webinar or workshop I could view?

Thanks!

I can kinda offer some help with questions one and three.
 

The current trends in gaming technology are clearly leaning towards AR and VR gaming. The software is rapidly getting easier and cheaper to produce, to the point where indie devs and hobbyists are doing it themselves. A decent part of me also wants to cite lootboxes, multiplayer PvP games, and a focus on graphics over content. However, Steam's Top 100 Games of the day seems to disagree with me. After all the issues with EA and lootboxes, several big name companies have started to tone it down as well (including Overwatch). Steam's list also seems to suggest that multiplayer is very important, but PvE seems to be most of the games on the list, where strictly PvP games make up a much smaller portion of the list. On that list, the only games I really see that I'd say prioritized graphics over content could be Rainbow Six: Siege (which I'm not really familiar with) and For Honor. Based on this list I'd conclude that, as far as game elements are concerned, team play, content, replay-ability seem to be the overwhelming trends in these games. 

I don't have an answer for question 2, but am curious myself.

As per question 3, I don't have a specific source to link you to. However, I cannot recommend enough the power of practice. I also know that Reddit.com has subs specific to Unity and Unreal (among many more) that get links to tutorials, workshops, talks, and the like at least weekly (sometimes more than one a day, every day, for a week straight). If you already have a Reddit account, or are OK with making one, I highly recommend following these pages and viewing their workshops. They also make a great resource for questions in the field.

3 hours ago, Alex Snyder said:

I can kinda offer some help with questions one and three.

If this is gonna be a "students are supposed to ask devs a question, but one student replies to another student" thing, I don't think the assignment's purpose is fulfilled.  To sum: students, please stay out of other students' threads.

5 hours ago, Alex Snyder said:

I can kinda offer some help with questions one and three.

Thank you so much!

If anyone has any advice on my second question that would be great

On 4/7/2018 at 6:22 AM, Ilenora said:

What trends and technologies do you think will be arising within the next 3 years and how will that impact the gaming industry?

A minor quibble: in most groups gaming = gambling, games = entertainment. Tech is always advancing in games.

VR has been on the rise and keeps trending up. It may not be today's hardware that explodes, but the industry seems to have finally hit critical mass.  It's been 25 years since the Virtual Boy and this is really the first time there have been a series of commercial successes.

Mobile games have been trending down and will likely continue to do so. The market is still enormous, but viable products are trending down.

Required skills will change slightly, but the market as a whole is enormous, so neither will be major shifts.

On 4/7/2018 at 6:22 AM, Ilenora said:

What skills and knowledge are required to enter and maintain a career in games?

Depends on the career.  Programming? Modeling?  Texturing? Animating? Testing? Design? Production?

Engineering and art disciplines generally require a bachelors degree or equivalent in most of the world.  Design and production are generally senior-level positions, because you don't get put in charge of a $10M portion of a game as a beginner, although there are some jobs like associate producer and level design that are occasionally filled by industry beginners.

On 4/7/2018 at 6:22 AM, Ilenora said:

Can anyone recommend a 'professional activity' for me to engage in, eg a gaming magazine I can subscribe to or a free webinar or workshop I could view?

If you're considering the programming track, this site can be of value. We tend to focus on students and budding developers, but there are plenty of industry vets.

Professionals do their work behind closed doors.  Console vendors protect everything behind multiple agreements, and violating them can destroy a developer's career.  Individual studios protect their products vigorously before release, and even when people are cleared to discuss them developers are generally limited to publicly visible stuff, and discouraged from revealing anything that isn't publicly visible.

You can review various game conference proceedings, but apart from a few technical presentations most industry conferences are places for production folk to make announcements. Game developers who are able to publish their works generally do so in IEEE and ACM conferences like SIGGGRAPH, SIGCHI, InfoVis, and similar.