What is this burnout?On this blog I have often detailed the stress of crunch time, which in other words is a state that a video game company goes into once the game is close to the deadline where all of the employees must work for no extra pay but must still work for extra hours. This is done to ensure that the game gets onto the shelfs on time and thus maximizes profit. This process has often led to calls for change which I have also detailed in this blog in the past. What are other causes of stress besides crunch?While crunch may be a big factor in why many people in the game industry are very stressed, there are many other causes of stress that are also important. One example of this is the fact that game industry workers often have to move every two years which creates the additional stress of moving in addition to the very tough job of designing video games. Another shocking reason as to why people are so stressed out working in the game industry is due to employees never being able to see their families due to the incredibly long hours that they work which in turn creates burnout. In short...
ReferencesLiao, Shannon. “Bloomberg's Jason Schreier Discusses His New Book, 'Press Reset,' on Video Game Studio Layoffs, Closures.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 11 May 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2021/05/11/jason-schreier-press-reset/.
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During these last few months I have been working in the Junior Programmer pathway which has proven to be quite a challenge in many ways. While I was working in Junior Programmer my skills improved tremendously from when I started programming in many ways such as how I learned to use different types of methods such as Vector3 which was basically the C# way of making the player move when, for example the Up arrow is pressed. I also learned about other concepts such as how to create levels. To do this, I used lines of code to create an array of sorts which basically stated that when all soccer balls are in the goal an additional soccer ball will be spawned depending on the wave number. Overall, while working in Unity I learned about the C# programming language and its capabilities such as being able to create entire levels of a game in addition to being easy to organize compared to other languages by using the structure of floats on the top and the voids below it.
While programming may be a very rewarding endeavor, it is naturally a very difficult task to complete. So, it is very important that I use the Internet for help. Fortunately, tutorials for Unity are much easier to find which became a huge lifesaver, especially for my UI project in which I had to make a main menu UI which was modeled after the tutorial that I watched as the part of my last major project in this pathway. For many projects, especially in the Simple Functionality mission, when I was stuck I would often look for help by looking for what other users did to fix these problems. I often looked at the code and analyzed it and saw where I messed up and fixed the issue. In short, the wealth of knowledge on the Internet regarding the Unity Game Engine really helped me to learn and complete the course. So what could be causing the setback in the game industry?On this blog I have talked almost exclusively about the game industry for the last two years, partially because I am trying to chronicle its growth since January 2019 when the first of these types of posts came out if I recall correctly. As such, almost all of my posts have been centered around the game industry as a fast-growing industry with its many flaws such as in-app purchases and microtransactions. This post is a little different though in that I am chronicling a prediction which states the game industry is going to lose revenue this year. This could be for a variety of reasons such as a growing emphasis on privatization by companies such as apple and a growing microchip shortage. The microchip shortage could have been caused by the influx in the demand for new computers as more people are staying home to work and are buying a new computer which leads to an influx in demand. While this may have caused a boom for several tech companies like Intel in 2020, these companies are going to struggle with the demand for a little while in 2021 which will result in less computers being purchased and thus less games. Privatization could hurt these companies because game companies often rely on targeted advertisements and without those they may lose some potential customers In short...
ReferencesTakahashi, Dean. “Newzoo: Global Game Market Will Shrink in 2021 for First Time in Many Years.” VentureBeat, VentureBeat, 6 May 2021, venturebeat.com/2021/05/06/newzoo-global-game-market-will-shrink-in-2021-for-first-time-in-many-years/.
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AuthorHello my name is Owen Howard. I am a junior currently enrolled at Durham School of the Arts and this blog will document my experiences in this class. Categories
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