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

[Johnnemann Nordhagen]

I'd be curious to see the source of those statistics - are you sure it was
LA specifically, and not California as a whole?  The San Francisco Bay Area
is also a big games center - larger than LA, I think, with LucasArts and all
its spin-offs, Sony, Capcom, Konami, and of course EA.  Seattle might also
be up there, with MS, Nintendo, and Valve, plus a handful of others.

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 3:01 PM, baylor wetzel <baylorw at gmail.com> wrote:


> >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

>>

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

>>

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