Game Industry and Association

[kanashi]

Since this website is about gaming more often then not there will be quite a few members having something to do with the game industry itself. This could comprise of; you work in the gaming industry, you are a student for the game industry, you have associated by testing, so on etc.

Since Experiences are not always seen throughout the site, and you will probably only notice the ones on your friends list why not share a little experience you have shared with this industry. Maybe explain what you do as part of a company, what your taking in college, what you are learning in a co-op, or what you have done to help improve or work with on games.


I am a game design student at the present time. I have not co-oped or worked with any major companies, but I have conceptualized ideas and art for games.

[Pocketwolf]

Originally Posted by kanashi

I am a game design student at the present time. I have not co-oped or worked with any major companies, but I have conceptualized ideas and art for games.

*writes kanashi's name down on "List of People to Contact when Making a Game in the Future"*

I'm not currently working in the game industry, but ran a stint as a tester at Atari Melbourne House (now Krome Studios Melbourne) for Test Drive Unlimited in 2006, and have participated in two closed betas since then (Mythos, Red Alert 3). My husband has been working at Transmission Games (previously IR Gurus) in Melbourne as a game designer for the past couple of years.

[Roxianna]

I started gaming in 1991 with Gemstone III. I got kinda pissed off at the customer service policies and decided I could do better. So my husband, Jon Radoff and I created Legends of Future Past. We won some awards and such, but for various business reasons we ended up in Web development. Then because of what our early adopter customers needed, we created one of the very first content management platforms and did very well indeed..

After ten years of that, we retired. Jon read, taught and wrote a bit. I played MMORPGs and ran my guild. As I played I got pissed about customer service in games again. I felt the industry treated players like dumbshit peons. I want to create a constituency of gamers with enough creds to influence game developer to build better games. I made a half-hearted attempt with CoreGame Review, but I was missing something critical: the interest and enthusiasm of my partner and hubby.

Meanwhile after a couple tries at getting his scifi published, hubby decided to write another game. This put us both on the same project, back in the original industry that had kicked off everything for us. One day, a friend from NCSoft invited me to LinkedIn. As soon as I saw the website, a light came on and we decided gamers needed a social network for their gamer identities and preferences.

I remember telling someone that Jon and I had had an idea so sweet, that we were going to take two three weeks off to make it so. Thus GuildCafe was born. I invited all the members of Section One to come join and many did. If you see by someone's forum name, it means they were among the first fifteen people to register and support our efforts.

We realized from the start that if we want the most influential gamers, we needed guild leaders, so we added guild hosting to get them here. This had the unfortunate side effect of letting people think we were in the guild hosting business--we're not.

Two years later, funded by FlyBridge Capital Partners and eighteen enthusiastic brilliant employees strong, GamerDNA is determined to make the world a better place through games. To that end, we support gamers by helping them find new games based not only on their playing history, but from quiz results and in-game experiences. We support the industry in creating better games, by sharing our unique data in our blog and in various presentations by Jon around the country.

I know it's kind of hard to see what I have decribed right now, but Trapper and the development team are making huge progress weekly and soon it's all going to come together, the guild hosting, recruitng, quizzes, profiles, recommendations and more in a blow your socks off way.

[sororitygirl]

I lost my socks a while ago ^^
It's good to hear the full story, Roxi. It's about what I figured, and I can't wait to see what direction the site goes in, to see it at full potential. People are calling it the facebook of gaming, a research tool, a guild hosting/recruitment site - we will see, i guess =)

And I can't help this: <Insert whine about how I want to be a part of the gaming industry></endwhine> Too cool!

=)

[Dvader83]

I have been a contract game tester for Volt Technical Resources since the day after the Xbox 360 launched. Mostly the testing has been for MS on the 360, though for a couple of months last year I was on a project for Eidos that was on the Wii.

[jayhogan18]

Still looking for an "in".
Not a lot of QA Testing jobs near me, even though its something I would love to do. Going to be taking a Games Programming degree at University next year so hopefully that will get the ball rolling.