What are the different occupations within the gaming industry?

One of the best things about the game industry is how much lateral movement is available. I started in IT, moved to Level Design, then Environment Art, then to Content Design, and eventually shifted into Production. Basically, in the 15 years I have been doing this, I have seen some people stay in the same position for their whole career because they love it. I have seen people parkour through the org chart because they are feeling around for their best fit. In every case, if you are dedicated, talented and willing to keep growing, you will be a desired asset.

As to specific positions, they vary company to company (and even department to department) but here are some broad strokes:

Design

Game Designer - Generalist who guides vision of the product as a whole

Systems Designer - Numbers and feature design. Implementation of complex systems which enable the gameplay. If your sword of badassery does a bajillion points of damage to sloths... that was this person's design.

Content Designer - If you love the lore of a world, the challenges of the quests, and the personalities of the NPCs, this is the person who made it come to life.

UI/UX - Menu, flow, button placement, and basically every aspect of how you interact with the game comes from this group. In my experience, there are few of these and fewer managers who understand their value. A talented UI/UX designer is the difference between a good game and a great game.

Level/World Designer: A hybrid between content designer and environment artist. They design the encounter maps, build them, populate them with monsters and friends, and basically... well they create the world that the game happens in.

Art

Concept artist - Beautiful drawings or paintings that help convey the intent of a game, feature, or creature. Led by the Art Director they establish the overall feel of an aspect of the game and give everyone a unified target to strive for.

2D Artists - Some games need more 2D than others. These folks are pivotal in the creation of backgrounds, sprites, menus, popups, textures, and other 2-dimensional pieces of the game.

3D Artists - Modelers who create 3D components of the game. In most places, they do most of the texture work. Some of them can rig for animation, but most stick with creating the object itself.

Rigger - Someone has to design and attach the skeleton (rig) that makes the art move. This person is a highly-specialized technical artist whose efforts improve the quality of the animation.

Animator - If it can move, they move it. The artistry of this position can be overt or super subtle, but a good one is universally sought after.

Technical artist - The artist who works most closely with engineers to make sure that everything is set up correctly for the art team to work. Some also do things like VFX, light animation, destructible environments, and so forth. At the very highest end, they are actually programmers who create new shaders and effects to bring supreme impact to the visuals.

Environment artist - Once the World builder has put everything in place (at least at a proxy or Sketch-up state) this group decorates it, lights it, adds ambient effects, and otherwise ramps the visual impact of every area.

Engineers (I have never been one, so I am not an authority here):

Server/Network engineer - Everything that happens in the background.

Client engineer - Player-facing features.

Gameplay engineer - Works with designers to make the experience compelling and complete.

Full Stack engineer - Someone who is capable of stepping into any position and understanding it well enough to progress forward.

(Like I said, this is not my strong suit; sorry for limited detail.)

Product Managers - The best ones span the gap between gameplay and business. They are highly qualified at designing features, and frequently bring MBA-level of business savvy to the table.

Project Managers - These are the schedule keepers. They manage the ever-shifting body of work and how it is distributed across the available people.

Producers - Excellent producers are equal parts Project Manager, Product Manager, Creative Director, and HR liaison. Most excel in at least two of the skill sets listed above.

QA - These folks are the barrier between the product and the players. They have to be both detail-oriented people, capable of drilling through literally thousands of checkpoints AND remain able to see things from the players' perspective and raise flags. Good QA testers are deeply valued team members and their opinions can guide the other disciplines in their jobs.

Every other aspect of business - At the core, a game company is a company. Human Resources, Information Technology, Facilities, Office Managers, Chefs, security personnel... they all have a place in the larger game companies.

I hope that helps.

There are a lot of different occupations within the game industry. I'm sure you can do some Google searched to find out all the different areas pretty easily. One great site for game developers that I recommend you start checking out is Gamasutra.

The main areas of game development are the following:
- Software Programming
- Art (including environment art, character art, animation, and UI/UX design)
- Game Design
- Production
- Project Management
- Product Management
- Quality Assurance
- Marketing

I would recommend doing a bit of research on the positions above and see if you find something that fits!

I love games too, and I work in the game industry, but I don't actually develop the games. I am a lawyer, and work in-house for a game company, so I have the best of all worlds!

Keep in mind that there are lots of opportunities to work in a game company (or any other kind of company) in different roles that support the product/company. These can be things like human resources, finance/accounting, public relations, law, sales, security -- we even have culinary!

Hi Logan,
We do also have a Customer Support department. Our job is supporting players with their issues, create content for players and support team. We are in the other side in contact with Game Studio to report issues/ bugs, etc....
Great other side: we can play and test new games!

Totally agree with the comments above - there are so many different avenues available in the game industry - International game players also need a voice and so localization (making sure the game is adapted for other countries and languages) is also an option!

Hii,

Here’s a good list when I searched through PayScale dot com’s Research Center under the drop down for jobs:

Search Results for "Gaming"

United States (Change Country)

Top Results for Job

Gaming Dealer - Multiple Games

Gaming Dealer

Gaming Surveillance Officer or Gaming Investigator

Gaming Supervisor

Gaming Manager

Gaming Software Engineer / Programmer

As for pay, you may as well visit the same page and search for the jobs individually to find more information.

Go with your skills, game companies hire all the roles regular companies along with artists and musicians. If you are good at something spending time working on games and meeting people in the industry is a great way to find where your skills meet your interests.

Game design is a field that you can try one your own or with a couple of friends and get a real sense of what the work is like and where you are at your best.

Games are one of the most interesting areas of the entertainment industry! From being a game designer to an artist to customer support to a behind the scenes business partner - the options are endless. I specialize in Communications - both talking to media like Buzzfeed, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal about our company and games - as well as crafting stories for our employees to keep them informed about our company. Like so may of my colleagues I love playing our games and sharing all the great stories our players and celebrity fans have about why games are a powerful way to stay connected with friends and family. Keep following your passion for games and check out online sites like GamesBeat and Kotaku to keep up on the latest trends!

The video game industry continues to grow, with plenty of innovations on the horizon!! I work in the cyber security department and there are plenty of opportunities if you like to see what the 'bad guys' can do, problem solve and work with lots of people. You'll see that as you keep learning different things, you can apply them on various projects and keep trying out different parts of the gaming industry.

Gaming Industry is like any other IT company but unlike focusing solely on technology we add in rock solid visuals to make u drool over.

We have all the departments such as:

1. Marketing


2. Customer Support


3. Legal


4. Sales

These are more like support functions but to stick to core gaming you the following:

1. Game Producer


2. Game Dev (Client or server side)


3. Game artist


4. Sound artist


5. QA


6. Game Designer


7. UI/ UX designer


8. Game Narrator

Hi Logan, so your question is very open ended and has many answers, I will attempt to provide a bit of insight from my end.

I'm part of the Operations teams which supports the network for the company.

Being unsure of what role you'd like to play is pretty common at your age, I had no idea either :)

For the Operations teams, you should have some experience in LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) at the least, if not a degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering or equivalent. Linux server experience, automation configuration tools, scripting skills, programming skills.

I don't work on the games themselves, but support the backend of the infrastructure, so its a great way to participate in helping my company, and my players, even if I'm not on a team that creates the games.

Hi Logan. There's some really great information from the answers people have given above. My advice to you is to get stuck in making some games (maybe you already have?), there's so many great resources online, and groups of like minded individuals to learn with. Learn a little bit of everything, and from that you'll naturally see where your passion and talents are, and you can then direct your learning to that path.

Best of Luck :)

Bangs.

I think it's safe to say that if there's a creative field or programming discipline, someone is the videogames industry is doing it right now. It's a really broad industry, so think about what you enjoy doing and you may find there's a way of taking that skill and applying it to making games.