You Got Game? You need ‘skillz’

The BBC writes about the skills shortage in the Games Industry:

The games industry says British universities are failing to equip graduates with the skills it needs. The warning comes from the industry campaign group “Games Up?”, which says games developers in Britain are facing a serious skills shortage. The lobby group says there are now 81 video games degree courses at British universities. But only four are accredited by Skillset, the government body which monitors such courses.

The courses available would be a factor but do you need a degree to be an ace in anything?

I don’t think so. I think the Games Lobby could work to reduce the cost of entry to the gaming market. For instance, the cost of a development kit for the Sony Playstation Portable is £50,000 for hardware alone and an extra £5,000 per person for the tools. Additional software like Renderman might add thousands more to the tally and this is all before you figure in salaries.[1]

This barrier to entry is not insignificant. If hackers in the home cannot work on these things, if universities cannot afford these costs or if students can’t work on them part time, then they are not going to develop the skills to compete in this marketplace.

Microsoft has given some lip service to this criticism with the XNA Game Studio Express. For $99 a year, you can transport code onto your XBox 360. This isn’t going to be the same as a full developer kit (I mean, you’re not going to cloning Halo 3 with it) but I know of some people who have been hired based on the quality of their XNA Community contributions. Reading the specifications, it really provides an interesting alternative.

That said, the market can be extremely profitable. While an edge case, Halo 3 cost around $50 million to develop but took in $170 million in sales on the first day. Compare this to Pacman – Atari spent around $100,000 to develop for the Video Computer System but made $300 Million back. costs of development are undoubtedly spiralling.

It’s not all doom and gloom. Nintendo hopes to offer development kits for as little as £1732 per developer and Sony does offer development kits to some schools and colleges at a cut price.

I think that Android and the iPhone will start to pave the way here – they offer free development kits, the iPhone offers hardware in excess of the PSP or Nintendo DS Lite (and presumably shipping Android hardware will be comparable) and they’ll make it really easy to buy and download new software (as we’ve seen already with iPhone).

It will be up to educators, lobbyists, interested civil servants and enterpreneurs to bridge this gap.

[1] Source: The Northern Ireland Digital Content Strategy (InvestNI)