Top 10 places to work as a game designer

Read this article about the game industry job families for more details. I know I am just one little voice and one small consumer, but how these companies treat their employees matters when it comes time to spend my money. Ubisoft has a fist full of games releasing in the next few weeks and I will be damned if I buy a single on, not until it has been made clear by the employees that exploitation has been cleaned up.

I am very interested in getting into the gaming industry as an animator, and have read that many companies are notorious for abusive workplaces, poor management, and not paying their employees. What should I be wary of when choosing my employer? Hi Alexis, most game companies already have more game ideas than they have time to make. To learn more about how game companies get game ideas, check out my article Can I sell my original game idea?

Do companies pay attention to which college you graduated from? I am planning to go for Computer Science video game development — programming. I am looking at several colleges that have made the top list out there. Would companies look down on a school like Shawnee State or Full Sail?

Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. As long as you build the right skills and have a portfolio to prove it, game studios will want to hire you!

Video Game Designer Jobs in Montana. Video Game Designer Jobs in Iowa. Video Game Designer Jobs in Minnesota. North Carolina. Video Game Designer Jobs in Texas. Video Game Designer Jobs in Georgia.

South Carolina. New Mexico. Video Game Designer Jobs in Alabama. Video Game Designer Jobs in Arkansas. Video Game Designer Jobs in Florida.

Video Game Designer Jobs in Wyoming. Video Game Designer Jobs in Tennessee. Video Game Designer Jobs in Hawaii. We used our most recent data to determine the states that are best for Video Game Designer positions. In order to rank the states, we needed to figure out not just where the jobs are located, but we also needed to establish how much these jobs paid. Below is the list of the best states for Video Game Designers. Some stand clearly apart from the rest when it comes to game development.

In fact, the city where you find your next job might be the most important decision you make in your entire career. Why move to a rain-soaked city like Seattle , Washington, when you could work at a game dev studio in a sunny beach town like Tampa , Florida?

The answer is, because Tampa is home to just 3 game studios, while Seattle is bursting at the seams with over 30 game studios. While some cities have more game jobs than others, some of those hotbed cities are concentrated in particular countries.

You can see that while the top game development country by far is the United States , the countries of England , Canada and Japan are also chock full of game development companies.

Even the Netherlands , at 11 on the list, weighs in at a hefty 49 game studios. If you want to work in the United States, the West Coast is clearly a good place to look for game jobs. California alone offers nearly game studios, and if you combine Seattle and its suburb of Bellevue , then Washington State comes in at 44 hotbed studios on par with Texas apparently, Austin really is keeping Texas weird.

Oregon State offers 22 studios, Illinois represents for the Midwest at 19 studios, and New York pulls weight for the East Coast with its 16 studios. But from there, the island is your oyster with choices from Leeds in the north to Brighton on the southern coast.

Why not explore? If you end up working late, the doner kebab is plentiful. From Montreal , Ottowa , and Quebec City in the east, all the way to Vancouver lying 5, kilometers to the west, Canada offers over video game studios located in hotbed cities.

I do hope you like poutine. The US, England and Canada have a lot to offer you for game jobs. But those are just the top countries for game dev studios — if we break things down purely by city instead of grouping by country, we find a large number of impressive game dev hotbed cities located all around the world.

Long famous for game development, Tokyo , Japan is a heavyweight with nearly 60 game companies including the likes of Bandai Namco, Konami, Hudson Soft, and Square Enix. To assemble these charts, I used raw data from the comprehensive crowd-sourced database at GameDevMap. Thanks so much to GameDevMap for providing such an excellent data source for job-hunting game developers around the world. Please visit GameDevMap. This book levels the playing field.

Thanks a lot for this amazing article.. S after working for years in India, since most of the top studios requires experience. Btw it would be great if you make such a post based on different game studios around the world. And thank you for the suggestion for a new article! We live in Brazil and my son is 14 years old.

He told me that he wants to work at Games Industry. Do you know how can he study in USA to develop his future career in this area? But there are also many other colleges and universities in the US that offer game-related degrees, or a non-game degree with a video game focus, which would also be good. Cities on the West Coast are incredibly expensive to live in, as is New York. London, too, for that matter. I like the one at Payscale. Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Irvine are all essentially the same place.

Thanks for pointing that out. Thank you for the kind words! The dataset you refer to is incomplete and out of date. For example, many of the studios listed in Brisbane have been closed for a while. Hi Giselle, game studios are maddeningly difficult to track because they can come and go so frequently. The raw data was sourced by GameDevMap. Fascinating, thanks for this article. That said I do understand the merits of having a large number of studios within one city.

Any data you have would be hugely welcome. Because most commercial game engines require designers to do scripting to control the behavior of enemies, puzzles, quests, and other game features.

For example, you might use scripting to tell the game engine to open a door whenever the player is nearby, has a key, and presses the correct button. Over one third of game studios in the study require that you know a scripting language before you apply for a job. They want you to already know scripting, so you can be productive right away. There are free YouTube videos , or paid courses on sites like Lynda. I found a free online tutorial teaching C to new programmers, and you can practice in your web browser.

Game design and development is a highly creative, highly artistic job. It takes huge amounts of creativity — and creative risk-taking — to make something new that players love. But not all of your ideas will be good, and not all of your designs will be fun. Even the best game designers make mistakes. Most have shipped entire games that were commercial failures. I certainly have!

Try to remind yourself that any and all feedback can be used to improve your game. Instead of dreading feedback from your teammates, start looking forward to it eagerly. View all criticism for what it really is: a valuable tool to help you make the very best games possible.

And for good reason: Game development is a team sport. Teamwork skills are hard to learn on your own. The best way to improve maybe the only way is to practice. Actually participate in projects as part of a team. Start a group project with your friends on the weekends, or join a local club that does group projects and events. Then work to become the most collaborative, reliable, positive, and fun teammate you can be. But with video games, the software also needs to be fun, interesting, and keep players engaged for possibly hundreds or thousands of hours.

And that requires a lot of trial and error. To excel at rapid prototyping, start by learning your design tools extremely well. Some designers prototype using simpler tools like GameMaker Studio, and some even test their designs on paper when possible.

Then get in the habit of trying your designs with real people. Watch them play, listen to their feedback, and improve your designs until your game is the best it can be. There you have it, the top 10 video game designer requirements from this survey.