Would an interesting job in gaming suit you? This is the right time to consider gaming jobs in your favorite sector.
Especially during this COVID-period, more and more people started playing video games as a result of staying home. This is why the gaming industry is growing like never before. Many people miss the social interaction, which gaming provides. It also offers an engaging distraction since the lockdowns began. Revenues of gaming companies and platforms have increased loads during the pandemic.
This also means that there’s an excellent job perspective within this sector. For the technical people out there, for the creatives, for business jobs, and people who’d like to become an influencer. In this blog, we’re going over all these interesting jobs for gaming – including their salaries, for as far as we can know.
The Gaming Sector is booming
We can tell that the Gaming Sector is booming when we’re looking at the stats. In 2020, the video gaming market is worth over $159 billion. The market is expected to be worth more than 200 billion dollars by 2023. This is the highest growth ever in history!
Video Games get better every year, with improved graphics and an improved experience. The new generation nowadays grows up with the most beautiful (childhood) games, as others were used to simple 2D-games.
Nowadays, research shows that consumers of Video Games stick more to the same game instead of playing multiple games, which makes gaming developers laser-focused on improving the gaming experience. A lot of revenue comes from in-game items or players buying the battle pass, especially when the game is free-to-play.
Mobile Gaming
More than half of the revenue within the Gaming Market worldwide nowadays comes from Mobile Gaming. The Mobile Gaming sector used to be the smallest segment within gaming, which has grown in an unprecedented rate making it the largest revenue contributor in the Global Gaming Industry!
Expected is that the Gaming Market continues to grow because the hardware keeps getting innovated to make smartphones and tablets run better. Gaming can now be done anywhere, everywhere. Without a beast of a Gaming PC.
The Darkside of Gaming Jobs..
Although these trends are favorable for the jobs within gaming, it’s also good to know that gaming sectors could have to endure the highest pressure.
Imagine you work on a project on a new game for a while. It’s shared on social media, the release date is announced, and it gets super popular unexpectedly. Many people get really excited about it, sharing it with all their game friends. And suddenly it reaches many parts of the world. We live in the age of early access releases, downloadable content, post-launch updates, beta-versions, and so on. This makes that the pressure of creating a smooth-running game, without errors and bugs, increases.
As an example, gaming developer Epic Games had to endure a very poor working environment for the producers of Fortnite. Working overtime was an expected service, and even though they paid people for these longer hours, the high workload resulted in health problems.
Getting a weekend away from work was a major achievement. As games can be grindy, this work was literally a grind. 50-hour workweeks were normal, in which the employees had to work very fast.
Coursera Courses
When you feel like you don’t possess the skills to get a job within the gaming sector, you don’t necessarily need to get a degree in order to get the knowledge you need. Especially for games programming jobs, you can learn everything from home, wherever you are, and at your own pace. You receive official certificates which you can show to the gaming company you want to apply to.
An interesting, popular course on Coursera is about Machine Learning. Developers make Non-playable Characters (NPC’s) look behaving like a real person, which is way cooler than when they behave like a bot.
When you’d like to know everything about Coursera, you can have a look at this extensive review.
Creative Gaming Jobs
Creativity is a really important skill to have for getting a job in gaming. There are many creative games out there, boosting the creative spirits of gamers. This means that most gamers are creative too.
Game Designer
Do you like to be a big part of the user experience of games, worldwide? Games designer has a very wide range thanks to the many specializations. When you are creative and you have a passion for video-games, you can earn your money by contributing to what you love.
All video games start with a concept that eventually brings the video game to life! Most story-based games nowadays have player characters, with each their own abilities, story, and characteristics.
You can be the one that develops these elements, being part of a creative team of designers and developers through the game production process.
Specializations within Gaming Designer
With a passion for games and drawing, you can become a GameArt professional. These are in great demand across the globe, but you can also specialize in coding to make the game run with these designs.
Your focus can also be on creating graphics or writing narratives as a story writer. Now your writing skills can come to life within a video game! An example of a game with excellent story-telling is Red Dead Redemption 2.
When you have a passion for gaming and music, you can consider a job as musician within gaming, producing sound effects and music tracks, such as the main theme music of a game.
By specializing, you can focus on the part of the design that you like the most. This job also continues to become more challenging, as video games become more complex than ever each year.
The average salary of a Game Designer in the US is $58.627.
Business Gaming Jobs
When creativity is not one of your most powerful personal qualities, you can choose for the business side of gaming. Organizational and great analytical skills are one of your best and when you’d like to come up with ideas or market your game into the world as best as possible, then a gaming job within business is a good choice.
As marketers are trained to focus on a specific niche, it’s different in the Gaming Industry. Here does marketing involve everyone, since gaming is a form of entertainment for players with all different kinds of backgrounds and age groups.
Every gaming company needs marketing to let the game reach its full potential, finding the right targeting group, and most importantly, understanding them.
With a job within marketing, for instance, Marketing Manager, you can contribute to improving the user experience. You will manage the staff and you are the one that’s deciding on pricing, creating an effective marketing plan, or negotiating distribution contracts for instance.
You also have to be aware of the latest developments within the gaming market.
The average salary of a Marketing Manager in the US is $65.834 a year.
Branding of Games
To attract (young) players, one of the most important tasks of a marketeer is to create a strong brand identity. This is important to take the game to the next level. Within gaming, there are two layers of branding: the brand that develops the game, and the gaming brand itself.
The gaming brand helps the game to be identified, creating a distinctive identity. When a brand is more known, players tend to reach out more to the games of this brand. A strong brand brings a feel-good factor to the players. The brand makes a game distinctive, representative, and is related to a welcoming brand identity.
To maximize your own brand’s visibility in this competitive gaming industry, a great way is to make use of influencer marketing. With the right partnership with a relevant influencer, your game can go stratospheric. Gaming Influencer is also a job, which will be explained later in this article.
Gaming Commentator or Announcer
When you have a lot of personal knowledge about games and wide knowledge about the gaming community, you can pursue your career as a game commentator or announcer.
A bachelor's degree in Journalism or Communication is helpful since you can give commentary on video game competitions (within eSports), presenting video-games, and providing live play-by-play updates.
Many people with these jobs also got their first experiences from streaming on Twitch or YouTube videos that include game announcements or commentary.
Sales
Gaming companies have to sell their video games to wholesalers or retailers on behalf of publishers. As a Sales Manager, for example, you come up with strategies to gain additional customers. In this job, great communication skills are even more important than in the job of Marketing Manager.
Also, it's essential to have exceptional leadership skills to motivate your staff. You are the one that’s analyzing how effective sales strategies are. You can also be determining the product’s profitability, the one setting goals for the staff or the one working with other departments for example.
The average salary of a Sales Manager in the US is $99.299 a year.
Technical Gaming Jobs
When you have a passion for technology and therefore are more interested in Technical Gaming Jobs, then you should consider applying for a technical gaming job. Games need to be right technically in order to give the most experience and entertainment to the players.
Gaming Tester
As a gaming tester, you literally play video games for money. Instead of playing the game purely for fun, you play to test a new game for bugs and design flaws, before it gets released on the market.
This is a pretty cool job if you like the combination of gaming with solving problems. Due to a heavy focus on quality assurance, it’s not as simple as it sounds. With a job as playtester, you improve the games that are built, looking for glitches. You also need to have a feeling for creativity and the possible flaws a game might have.
Therefore, experience in playing many different kinds of videogames is essential. You need to repeat the same actions over and over again in different ways, to make sure the game is as free of errors and bugs as possible.
Important to know is that a gaming tester would be a contract worker since many gaming companies only hire temporary game testers. This means that when the testing phase is done, your job (contract) is over.
Also, more gaming companies use Gaming Influencers to test the games before they’re released, for an increase in popularity. This makes that gaming testers get some competition.
The average salary of a Gaming Tester in the US is $55.030 a year.
Game Programmer
You have decent coding skills, so why not use them to contribute to the development of games? Without coding, there are no games.
As a lover of games, a computer programmer can be the right job for you. You are the one responsible for writing the codes that allow a video game to come to life. This can be for a computer or a gaming console.
You also work closely with many others, such as graphic designers, animators, and musicians to create the game the best way. Having a degree in a subject like software development or computer science can be very helpful.
The tasks of a game programmer include developing and implementing game software. You also have to make sure that the game design is fully implemented and performs as expected. The technical specifications have to be documented carefully.
Technical Gaming Support
When you like to support people by helping them with game problems and you want to bring your communication skills to the next level, you can become a specialist in technical support.
You are be the link between video game companies and the public. The main task is to help gaming users by answering their questions and support them by phone, online chat, and email.
The average salary of Technical Gaming Support in the US is $47.052 a year.
Gaming Influencer - Content Creator
Ever dreamt of having a big audience, speaking to thousands of people? Therefore, companies are interested in a partnership with you for promoting their products. Can you imagine you’re able to make a living out of creating content?
A Gaming Influencer is one of the hardest ‘jobs’ to get, and Gaming influencer is therefore not a job to get, but a job to create.
You need to put loads of time and dedication towards growing your own brand and identity. Gaming Influencers use platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. The more content they publish, the more likely they are to be found and liked by many people worldwide.
Not everyone can become a Gaming Influencer. It’s noticeable that the most successful Gaming Influencers are either very, very good at the game, or they can provide a high level of entertainment, or they have something else that makes them unique.
As soon as you start to get a big audience, (gaming) companies could be interested in a partnership with you to promote their products. You can be the one reaching the target group they’re looking for, and people are more likely to follow your advice as they are bonded to you.
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