Inside the Video Game Industry offers a provocative look into one of today's most dynamic and creative businesses. Through in-depth structured interviews, industry professionals discuss their roles, providing invaluable insight into game programming, art, animation, design, production, quality assurance, audio and business professions. From hiring and firing conventions, attitudes about gender disparity, goals for work-life balance, and a span of legal, psychological, and communal intellectual property protection mechanisms, the book's combination of accessible industry talk and incisive thematic overviews is ideal for anyone interested in games as a global industry, a site of cultural study, or a prospective career path. Designed for researchers, educators, and students, this book provides a critical perspective on an often opaque business and its highly mobile workforce. Additional teaching materials, including activities and study questions, can be found at https://www.routledge.com/9780415828284.

The Video Game Industry provides a platform for the research on the video game industry to draw a coherent and informative picture of this industry. Previously this has been done sparsely through conference papers, research articles, and popular science books. Although the study of this industry is still stigmatized as frivolous and ‘only’ game oriented, those who grew up with video games are changing things, especially research agendas, the acceptance of studies, and their interpretation. This book describes and defines video games as their own special medium. They are not pinball from which they grew, nor movies which they sometimes resemble. They are a unique form of entertainment based on meaningful interactions between individuals and machine across a growing sector of the population. The Video Game Industry provides a reference foundation for individuals seriously interested in the industry at the academic level. As a result, this book will serve as a reference in curricula associated with video game development for years to come.

"An award-winning videogame writer offers a rare behind-the-scenes look inside the gaming industry, and expands on how games are transformed from mere toys into meaningful, artistic experiences"--

Video games have had a greater impact on our society than almost any other leisure activity. They not only consume a large portion of our free time, they influence cultural trends, drive microprocessor development, and help train pilots and soldiers. Now, with the Nintendo Wii and DS, they are helping people stay fit, facilitating rehabilitation, and creating new learning opportunities. Innovation has played a major role in the long term success of the video game industry, as software developers and hardware engineers attempt to design products that meet the needs of ever widening segments of the population. At the same time, companies with the most advanced products are often proving to be less successful than their competitors. Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry identifies patterns that will help engineers, developers, and marketing executives to formulate better business strategies and successfully bring new products to market. Readers will also discover how some video game companies are challenging normal industry rules by using radical innovations to attract new customers. Finally, this revealing book sheds light on why some innovations have attracted legions of followers among populations that have never before been viewed as gamers, including parents and senior citizens and how video games have come to be used in a variety of socially beneficial ways. David Wesley and Gloria Barczak's comparison of product features, marketing strategies, and the supply chain will appeal to marketing professionals, business managers, and product design engineers in technology intensive industries, to government officials who are under increasing pressure to understand and regulate video games, and to anyone who wants to understand the inner workings of one of the most important industries to emerge in modern times. In addition, as video games become an ever more pervasive aspect of media entertainment, managers from companies of all stripes need to understand video gaming as a way to reach potential customers.

From the bestselling author of Blood, Sweat, and Pixels comes the next definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the video game industry: how some of the past decade's most renowned studios fell apart—and the stories, both triumphant and tragic, of what happened next. Jason Schreier's groundbreaking reporting has earned him a place among the preeminent investigative journalists covering the world of video games. In his eagerly anticipated, deeply researched new book, Schreier trains his investigative eye on the volatility of the video game industry and the resilience of the people who work in it. The business of videogames is both a prestige industry and an opaque one. Based on dozens of first-hand interviews that cover the development of landmark games—Bioshock Infinite, Epic Mickey, Dead Space, and more—on to the shocking closures of the studios that made them, Press Reset tells the stories of how real people are affected by game studio shutdowns, and how they recover, move on, or escape the industry entirely. Schreier's insider interviews cover hostile takeovers, abusive bosses, corporate drama, bounced checks, and that one time the Boston Red Sox's Curt Schilling decided he was going to lead a game studio that would take out World of Warcraft. Along the way, he asks pressing questions about why, when the video game industry is more successful than ever, it's become so hard to make a stable living making video games—and whether the business of making games can change before it's too late.

A Precarious Game is an ethnographic examination of video game production. The developers that Ergin Bulut researched for almost three years in a medium-sized studio in the U.S. loved making video games that millions play. Only some, however, can enjoy this dream job, which can be precarious and alienating for many others. That is, the passion of a predominantly white-male labor force relies on material inequalities involving the sacrificial labor of their families, unacknowledged work of precarious testers, and thousands of racialized and gendered workers in the Global South. A Precarious Game explores the politics of doing what one loves. In the context of work, passion and love imply freedom, participation, and choice, but in fact they accelerate self-exploitation and can impose emotional toxicity on other workers by forcing them to work endless hours. Bulut argues that such ludic discourses in the game industry disguise the racialized and gendered inequalities on which a profitable transnational industry thrives. Within capitalism, work is not just an economic matter, and the political nature of employment and love can still be undemocratic even when based on mutual consent. As Bulut demonstrates, rather than considering work simply as a matter of economics based on trade-offs in the workplace, we should consider the question of work and love as one of democracy rooted in politics.

The inside story of the booming video game industry from the late 1990s to the present, as told by the Managing Director of Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment (The Division, Far Cry 3, Assassin's Creed: Revelations). At Massive Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, a key division of one of the largest, most influential companies in gaming, Managing Director Polfeldt has had a hand in some of the biggest video game franchises of today, from Assassin's Creed to Far Cry to Tom Clancy's The Division, the fastest-selling new series this generation which revitalized the Clancy brand in gaming. In The Dream Architects, Polfeldt charts his course through a charmed, idiosyncratic career which began at the dawn of the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox era -- from successfully pitching an Avatar game to James Cameron that will digitally create all of Pandora to enduring a week-long survivalist camp in the Scandinavian forest to better understand the post-apocalyptic future of The Division. Along the way, Polfeldt ruminates on how the video game industry has grown and changed, how and when games became art, and the medium's expanding artistic and storytelling potential. He shares what it's like to manage a creative process that has ballooned from a low-six-figure expense with a team of a half dozen people to a transatlantic production of five hundred employees on a single project with a production budget of over a hundred million dollars. A rare firsthand account of the golden age of game development told in vivid detail, The Dream Architects is a seminal work about the biggest entertainment medium of today.