Hey I work in web design and our market is pretty much stil in the slumps, is the game dev market down as well? Or might it be a viable place to try and migrate my skills?

It''s down in other terms, I would like to mention it as a not healty market, for a while. But for how long I don''t know exactly. If I count, it''s for a long time not healty.
There are a couple of years over and the economic failure in the games industry market is still visible. For the little and middle sized publishing and development companies it''s a difficult time. If you noticed, the big boys are mostly focused on developing new versions of "old" succesfull retail game titles. So developing new original retail game titles is fewer.

Overall, video games (console and PC) had their biggest ever year in 2001, so it is still growing. It was impacted by the recent economic slump, but not to the degree of the .com companies and other Net-based businesses.

For existing investment, there''s no problems.

However, in terms of new investment, the stock market/VCs/banks are still *very* wary of investing in anything technology based after being burnt by dot com vapourware (to them, tech is tech, whether a .com selling knickers or a game development company).

Depends on what game market your talking about

Indie Innovation Alive and Well

>Overall, video games (console and PC) had their biggest ever >year in 2001, so it is still growing. It was impacted by the >recent economic slump, but not to the degree of the .com >companies and other Net-based businesses.

That are nice words. But look at the reality of other research results of how many game companies developers as publishers are took over by a bigger fish or ended in closing the doors.

Infogrames took over GT Interactive, Hasbro Interactive.
Activision Value took over Expertsoftware and Headgames.
In my country several game publishers I spoke to a couple years ago don''t exist, they all bankcrupted. Look at the financial troubles of Interplay, Eidos etc. How many people did they fire to survive. The same is for 3DO. Also Dynamics, Sierra.

And that are well known companies, most of them got an investor.
So it isn''t again a healty market at all.

Also the financial managing of a development studio is very difficult. Read this article The Game Industry and the Economics of Failure written by an expert:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article867.asp

Also read the financial news on gamasutra.

Well I know dexterity is having one of their best years on record. Steve just hired some folks to help him grow the business and he has a number of new games coming out very soon.
According to Steve "I''d say we''re about as far from going
belly up as you can get. We have no debt, plenty of cash, and a
positive cashflow. There is enormous demand from customers for new games as well as from developers for our publishing services"

I don''t think people should pay too much attention to the economy. Plenty of people make plenty of money even in a recession. Just because the economy is in a recession doesn''t mean your business has to be.

For Samu Games, 2001 was one of the worst years we''ve had. Sales were in a slump all last year, and only recently began to show growth again.

Talking with other developers at the GDC, we weren''t alone. The economic recession seems to have been the biggest culprit, though some of the problem can also be traced to 9/11.

GDC 2002 is a definite indicator of this:

* Far fewer Expo exhibitors
* Fewer sessions
* Fewer attendees
* Only a single major advertiser (Microsoft)

So, despite reports of record-high revenues for the industry as a whole, and isolated boom areas, 2001 was hardly considered a banner year. 2002, though, is showing some signs of real improvement.

DavidRM
Samu Games

Dexterity is however an exception of the succes stories.
There are not much of that, however I know people who do this for living. But it isn''t very much. The most shareware developers are in the business software. But I agree if you do it serious there is a niche waiting online for entertainment software.

I don''t know...

I hear everyone here saying how the games industry is in a slump, then I hear that sales are going higher and higher every year.

My thoughts?

If you make Daikatana or back it, you''re going under.

If you make only one character (with boobs) and nothing else worth mentioning, you''re going under.

If you are designing a multiphase multiplexer for sending data in excess of Gigabit speeds across the internet and your management team is busy flying around the world in sleeper Jets at $10k/trip, plus 4-star hotels and burning money hyping the product that isn''t done, you''re going under.


There is a theme here: If nobody is minding the shop, then you''re going to have problems, no matter the industry that you''re in.

While I''m generally against excessive oversight, there needs to be some checking going on. I know of no less than 4 companies that have went under, AFTER independent auditors (like Arthur Anderson) said that everything was going great.

If we want to see more success stories, then we need to start acting more responsibly as an industry and create an auditing force that will engage in industry specific auditing. If that was in place, Daikatana wouldn''t have burned through the rediculous millions while ''Superfly'' still walked off a cliff (which also ended the game), it would have had management come in and get it back on track if things started falling apart like they did.

Missed milestones and the resulting budget shortfalls are not the fault of gamers (who are buying our games), they are the fault of the developer. I know that sounds harsh and I''m sure that a lot of developers want to use the "But the publisher..." argument, saying that the milestones were what the publisher imposed upon them, well I guess I''d have to say that they should have either held out on the schedule or have negotiated for more money so that they could have gotten more programmers to help push the project forward at the pace the publisher wanted.

As an industry, we love the young flashy developers. They show off what many of us want to be; young, rich and decadent. Making games is not only a way to get there though, it''s part of the reward. Maybe we need to step back and realize that there is no ''golden child''. Every developer has to prove himself before again during every project. The moment that you don''t make them is the moment that they stop being just young and rich and become decadent with your money.

Of course, those are just my thoughts... YMMV