[game_edu] placement rates (was Introduction - Sheri Rubin)

[baylor wetzel]

>USC has a 49% placement rate?


Oh lord no. i was at their last demo days in May and from listening in the
hall, it sounded like everyone had multiple offers. i watched give people in
a row turn down an executive from a particularly well known MMO that my
students would have killed to get into. i'd be surprised if their placement
rate wasn't near 100%

The last statistics i saw said 49% of all game jobs in North America are in
LA. 18% are in Austin and then a handful of cities (or North Carolina) had
the majority of the rest. Games jobs, like Hollywood jobs, are very
concentrated geographically. My school, in the midwest, has a hard time
getting companies to visit us (especially in Winter), which is perhaps why
we've had 40-50 of our students at the last 3 GDCs. LA, on the other hand,
has game companies everywhere, so it's less of an imposition for their staff
to show up at a local school

Location isn't the only reason USC's program places so many people (from
what i can tell, it's actually a pretty good program), but it certainly
helps

-b

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Dan Carreker <DanC at narrativedesigns.com>wrote:


>  Baylor,

>

> I think you have some great points here.

>

> USC has a 49% placement rate?  (making sure I understand you correctly)

> Does anyone have any other data on placement rates? I'm giving a talk

> soon on how to choose a game design school and I'm sure this question will

> come up.

>

>

>

> Dan Carreker

> www.NarrativeDesigns.com

> "If I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood.

>  I'd type a little faster."  - Asimov

>

> ----- Original Message -----

> *From:* baylor wetzel <baylorw at gmail.com>

> *To:* amenezes at imagecampus.com.ar ; IGDA Game Education Listserv<game_edu at igda.org>

> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 22, 2009 2:45 PM

> *Subject:* Re: [game_edu] Introduction - Sheri Rubin

>

> >In the end, we are training future customers for these

> > companies and it would be wiser to consider us as

> > partners, not customers, don't you thnk?

>

> i realize i'm going to seem like a tremendous jerk, but i'm not sure that

> it is a real partnership. Probably the top issue our school is facing is

> placement - most of our students just aren't getting jobs with game

> companies. This situation is true for most of the game schools i know of

> (USC's GamePipe, based in LA next to 49% of all North American game jobs,

> being the big exception). i don't think my school has a lot of leverage with

> game companies and although i wish they'd give us licenses for old games,

> snippets of source code, free (or cheap) copies of Unreal 2007, etc., i

> honestly don't see any reason why they should

>

> It's also worth noting that publishers aren't developers and developers are

> often very, very small and frequently go out of business, so setting up a

> relationship with most is fairly difficult. Many of the people they hire

> aren't people with game degrees, they're friends and talented people

> (probably without a degree) who send in a fantastic portfolio. Maybe they

> should hire someone different (although there's a good argument that they

> shouldn't), but they don't. So what's their incentive to take the (not

> insubstantial) time to manage relationships with game schools, especially

> given how many have popped up in the last few years (the growth in the

> number of game schools has been truly dizzying)?

>

> We use cheap tools (Flash, Torque, the level editor in Unreal 2004) and not

> very cheap educational versions of tools such as Photoshop and 3DSMax. If we

> want to show them "classic" games, we show them movies and screenshots of

> them (asking a student to invest 40 hours per game to find those classic

> bits like the bathroom scene in Deus Ex or the low int dialog option in

> Fallout is fairly unrealistic) or, to study concepts, we make our clones. As

> much as we wish we could get Mudbox, a motion capture system, the source

> code to Half-Life and unlimited free copies of Monkey Island, we'd be happy

> with just the game companies showing up at our career fair

>

> -baylor

>

>  ------------------------------

>

> _______________________________________________

> game_edu mailing list

> game_edu at igda.org

> http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_edu

>

>

> _______________________________________________

> game_edu mailing list

> game_edu at igda.org

> http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_edu

>

>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_edu/attachments/20090922/3beb285e/attachment-0001.html>