AGDC Day 4

Day 4 of AGDC is career day. Today’s sessions are all sponsored by the Game Career Guide magazine and focus on getting into the industry.

The keynote speaker for the day was from Play Fish a company that makes Facebook games. They talked about how they made a free to play game in Facebook, where you create a character, and your own space and the invite your friends into the game to visit your space. They make money by selling items in the game to make your digital space more personalized. They talked about how they are selling a lip sofa in the game for $40 and are making millions. They also talked about the number of players in the game, which is close in numbers to that of mainstream games such as WOW. Personally, I don’t see why people would pay for items in a game, sounds like waste of money, but hey the game company is making money.

The next talk was on resume building. The hiring manager from Obsidian Entertainment was the presenter. He talked about the structure of resumes. For students who have little experience in games should develop a functional resume design, that includes:

• Your letterhead, with name, address, phone number, email, and web address.
• Objective statement (make sure it states what you do)
• List of skills
• Education
• Experience

After lunch there was a HR Q&A, where three HR managers from various companies answered questions from the audience. This was probably the most beneficial talk since someone asked why you hardly ever see entry level job openings. Basically they said these openings are quickly filled by word of mouth, and really only IGDA members find out about it. Therefore one really needs to be a member to get into the industry. Another topic brought up, was if companies saw any signs of moving to the mid west. The answer, big surprise, was NO. They said most game companies want to steal the best designers and developers from each other, thus they need to be near each other, so for right now companies are going to stay on the west and east cost.

That was pretty much the end of the show, after that. All around it was a really good event and I was glad I could go!

Now, to hit the road and go home!