“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”. This quote from Confucius applies even to gaming, no matter how absurd it seems. Yes, you can make a career out of gaming! Let’s find out how!
Different roles in Gaming
Who doesn’t like to play Games!! But do you know, you can just make a living out of it? Yes!! a career, a successful one. In the early 2000, we may have never imagined something like this, that a person can be having gaming as a career for making a living out of it, but we are in 2021 now and indeed there are multiple career opportunities in gaming. Let’s look at it one by one.
Game Designer
This is the square one of making games. The job of a game designer is to come up with a storyline/narrative, characters, environments, levels, and other specifics of the game, and then collaborate with the team to make it happen. In layman’s terms, game designers visualize the game and then guide their team to create it. You don’t require coding knowledge for this position, though.
Being a game designer is a complex job as you have to make sure everything goes well together, from story to characters to a color palette to numerous other things that make a game. One should be ready to face competition as this is one of the most desired positions in the industry.
Animator/Artist
As an animator, you would bring all the characters, tools, weapons, environment, textures, basically the whole game, to life, visually, for that purpose you’re required to have 2D and 3D art skills. In a nutshell, you’ll be handling all the visual aspects of the game.
Animators, with the help of the game designer and creative team, enhance the visual experience of the game. They make use of their art skills and various software to animate movements of the character and environment of the game.
Game Programmer
To all the gamers who love coding, this is a dream job for you guys. The role of a programmer is to implement the vision a game designer has for a particular game.
After providing animations and characters to the programmer, they make sure that the character is playable and can be controlled properly. Programmers make sure that every asset is linked and synced properly. They also have to work on artificial intelligence that makes in-game interactions seamless.
This role demands sheer programming, that’s why an individual who actually loves coding and has a thorough knowledge of it should apply for this position. It may get frustrating at times, though, when your code just won’t run.
Audio Designer
From the theme music that you vibe to, to getting a lump in your throat while end credits appear, and everything in between, audio designers or engineers, are responsible for it. They take care of all the things where the sound is involved. They take care of character dialogues (voice-overs), sound effects, and music.
In recent times, studios go the extra mile when composing music for the game and theme music for characters. They hire a professional orchestra to compose soundtracks that go along with the theme of the game.
This is one of the most important positions, as audio is the fundamental part of the ultimate gaming experience.
Writer
The role of a writer has become more significant these days. The writer’s job is to write narratives, dialogues, and scripts for the game. They also have to do technical writing such as documentation and instruction manuals.
Writers also come up with characters and their stories. They make sure that each character sticks to their personality throughout the game. This is a creative job as you have to write hundreds or even thousand pages of new and original dialogues and story-line.
Game Tester
Being a game tester, you’re required to play games and report about user experience, bugs, and the pacing of the game, basically, your job is to check for glitches and make sure that the game is free of any errors.
As fun as it sounds to do this for a living, it’s actually a tough job. You’re required to clear a single level numerous times, visit every corner of the game, and document all the observations and other specifics. It really is a monotonous job, where you have to observe and lookout for something new, every time you repeat the same level.
It is a significant role, though, as customers will eventually come across the bug, if not tested before release, and it can harm the reputation of the studio. Individuals should be ready to log all the findings and almost endlessly play the game, just to find all the bugs and glitches.
Marketing
After rigorous work from all the professionals, when the game is finally ready to play, it is now up-to-the marketing team to make sure the gaming world knows about it. The marketing department comes up with a strategy to sell their products to gamers. They conduct surveys to analyze the market and then formulate a plan.
Professional Gamer
This is the end goal for the majority of gamers, to play the game they love so much for a living. Professional gaming is done in teams or individually, depending on the game.
One should be extremely skilled to be a professional gamer as the players who play professionally have their own style and competence of the highest level. Competitive gaming has big prize money and sponsorship ads to it as well.
If you’re not as skilled as other professionals, you should be entertaining enough to retain an audience throughout your “let’s play” videos. “Let’s play” videos pay heavily if you’re successful enough to build yourself some audience. If you, as a gamer, are positively talked about by people, you’ll grab a brand deal in no time.
Conclusion
No matter how hard they try to trash gaming, just know the fact that you can make a lucrative career out of it. Don’t fall into the trap of monotony, do your research, explore yourself, and then work hard once you’ve figured out what it is that you want to do for a living. If you were not aware, you can literally play games to improve yourself (how gaming is beneficial?). So next time when someone tries to guilt-trip you for playing games, just send them this blog. And if you are the one who was guilt-tripping someone, it’s about time to pick yourself a controller.
List of Institutes for Gaming/Design
- National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar—Gujarat
- Artemisia College of Art & Design, Tigaria Rao, Indore, Madhya Pradesh
- UPES, Dehradun, Uttarakhand
- Arena Animation Creative campus, Bengaluru, Karnataka
- Lovely Professional University, Phagwara, Punjab
- Graphic Era Hill University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand
- Pearl Academy, Delhi -West, and Bengaluru
These are some of the best Institutes for higher-level education in gaming design, you can find a number of small institutes which also give good learning opportunities but you may have to struggle for finding a suitable job.
Job Opportunities in Gaming
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Rockstar Games – Bengaluru, Karnataka
- Role – Game Tester.
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Sportskeeda
- Role – Gaming Editor.
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Apple – Gurgaon, Haryana
- Role – Games Business Manager.
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Hike – Delhi
- Role – Backend Engineer.
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Godspeed Games – Pune
- Role – Game Tester
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Aswaforce – Mehsana, Gujarat
- Role – 3D Artist
There are various job roles available, you can just check here on LinkedIn. Naukri, Monster India, Times jobs.
Some of the best-known personalities in the gaming community in India
- Ankit “V3nom” Panth
- Saransh Jain – FIFA
- Krish “MooN” Gupta – Dota 2
- Amit “Zapheto” Malwal – Dota 2
- Simar “Psy” Sethi
- Aditya “Spammy” Singh
- Vatsal “NGHTMRE2K” Uniyal
- Aman “Cruzi” Vivek
- BlizzarD – Balaji Ramnarayan
- DitterBitter – Mihir
- Excali – Karan Mhawadkar
- Ace – Tejas Sawant
- Dynamo Gaming – Aaditya Sawant
- CarryisLive- Ajey Nagar
- MortaL- Naman Mathur
- Ankit Panth
- HydraFlick- Rohan Ledwani
- Kronten Gaming – Chetan Sanjay Chandgude
- Gunshot- Harnit Khatri
- Rakazone Gaming- Rishab Karanwal
- Maxtern
List of Esports leagues and tournaments.
Day by day it’s getting messy from a career perspective and a lot of people are getting confused about what should be the priority in choosing the right career path. Maybe you have chosen the wrong path just because of your parent’s expectations or because your friend is doing something you also jumped into it. CAREER is your path, guidance can’t be always useful, in this competitive modern world you have to choose your career path wisely.
Thank you for reading and don’t forget to share with people who might be interested in gaming and may one day make a successful career out of it.
