How Gaming Can Become a Career

If you asked someone 30 years ago if video gaming could lead to a career, the answer would have been “no,” followed by laughter.

Transversely, asking someone if Pop Warner Football could lead to a career in the NFL could lead to a reasonable discussion on the benefits of teamwork, exercise, and physical coordination.

There was — and sometimes still is — a stereotype that gamers were basement-dwelling nerds with no social skills or ambition.

Now, a generation later, that same question is being asked in the gaming community. The answer isn’t laughter but more likely, “That depends.”

While Hollywood has seen a downward trend over the past 10 years, video gaming has surged.

It depends, because having a career in video games doesn’t necessarily mean becoming a professional gamer.

Sure, there are sponsored global teams making millions a year. It’s still akin to the NFL, where only a tiny fraction of players are good enough to play on any given Sunday. That’s not to say it can’t happen. Colleges and universities around the country have started offering competitive gaming scholarships to help offset the cost of higher education.

But even if professional gaming isn’t a career milestone, the gaming market has grown so large in the past two decades that having a career “in gaming” can mean a multitude of things. After all, in 2014 consumers spent $22.41 billion on the gaming industry.

Related: One Gaming Addict’s Story

To put that in perspective, if you add in box office and DVD sales and rentals for 2014, Hollywood made just under $30 billion. While Hollywood has seen a downward trend over the past 10 years, video gaming has surged. That means career opportunities are becoming more common and have a wider variety than ever before.

For example, odds are you’re aware of Markus “Notch” Persson, even if the name doesn’t sound familiar. Persson developer “Minecraft,” a popular computer game that has been ported to just about every device imaginable. In 2014, Mojang, the studio Persson founded, was purchased by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. And while every game developer most assuredly will not see a billion-dollar payday, the average salary in 2014 for a game designer was $73,800.

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Within a game studio there are more options as well. Programmers, engineers, artists, and animators, all essential to the development of a game, averaged even more than designers last year. Even quality-assurance testers, the folks who play the same game thousands of times hoping to find all the problems and get them removed before its release to the public, averaged just under $60,000 last year.

The musical composers who create ambience and subtly inciting emotion in your favorite title also can make a good living. It’s worth noting most composers are contracted for their work on games, but those who are on staff are made move than $95,000 last year.

Even if you lack a technical aptitude for game design, there are other options to break into the gaming industry.

In marketing, for instance, you’re responsible for making sure the world’s attention is on the next game your studio is responsible for. Everybody has seen a video game commercial and thought, “That looks really awesome.” You can thank a marketer for that. They also deal with journalists hoping to wrangle good publicity or defuse bad publicity.

“Wow, so you just play video games for a living?” is the most-asked question to video game journalists and writers. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t so simple.

The average salary in 2014 for a game designer was $73,800.

Writers often get to play games prior to their public launch, in order to have their opinions public for those on the fence, but sinking hundreds of hours into any one title is rare. Because multiple games release every week, it’s often “get game, play game, write about it, move on.” That doesn’t mean they get paid for their gaming time.

Video-game journalists, however, actively research and report on the industry. Writing features, reviews, investigative reporting, news, and financial analysis can fall to a journalist who will have to work with deadlines and, if they write for an outlet that appears in print, limited space.

Thirty years ago, telling someone you were pursuing a career in video games meant something entirely different from it does now. Being skilled at writing, mathematics, coding, music, or being a “people person” can lead to a career in the booming industry. And if you played games growing up, you’ll have an edge over the competition.