Some suggest the video game industry's rapid growth within the last ten years most closely resembles the over-inflation of a balloon or a bubble, and that it will soon burst, sending jobs, careers, and aspirations to the wayside. Perhaps in support of this claim, independent market analyst Wanda Meloni estimates that 8,450 people in the industry lost their jobs since July 2008.
According to Gamasutra, Meloni used Game Developer Research's Game Developer Census 2008 report to "calculate the current percentage of game industry layoffs in North America at 12%, based on the census report's tally of 53,900 workers."
I get it. A lot of people were laid off, but as user "gen ideer" noted in the comments section of the article, any number of these individuals might have found employment elsewhere in the video game industry since that time.
Sales across the industry are up this year (especially in our our free-to-play MMO sector which has seen exponential growth), so if you drank the doom and gloom Kool-Aid, spit it out. Times are tough, but all things considered the video game industry is doing quite well.
Posted by Kyle Stallock
May 12th, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment