I don't work in the game industry. I'm just a lifelong player who has talked from time to time with game developers. So don't take this as gospel, but here's my take on long-term prospects.
"AAA" games, the real earthshakers like Halo and World of Warcraft, can only be made by large teams with multi-million-dollar budgets. Inescapable truth. Success in conventional game development has come to depend more and more on a corporate lifestyle: no loose cannons, no lone geniuses. Game developers have to master their C and C++ and perfect their 3D optimizations; game designers have to be very lucky, very hardworking, and very low-paid. (The design side is much harder to break into.)
Games from established studios have to be guaranteed moneymakers, mostly appealing to 15-to-35-year-old males, which is why we see lots and lots of online gunplay and me-too rhythm and karaoke games. The sudden upswing in rhythm and karaoke games points out the increasing mainstreaming of video games, though, which brings me to point 2:
Independent development. The internet has made it extremely easy to write a simple game in Flash or something and get it plastered all over the internet. You go viral with a decent business model, you can cash in, and quite a few games have already been optioned for downloadable console ports after an online success. Especially for casual games -- pick-up-and-go entertainment, usually in the puzzle category -- this can be a great road to recognition, and it's the only one available to the reclusive-genius solo programmer.
Solo development with internet distribution is also the only way to release game types that just aren't that popular these days. I've been playing a game named The Spirit Engine 2 [ http://thespiritengine.com/ ] lately; if you look at the screenshots, you can see that it's not the kind of game that would fly on the mass market.
In fact, my advice to anyone who wants to "make games" is just to make games. Don't go work for a game company. You'll do more work for less pay than you would in any other programming job, and you probably won't even scratch your game-creation itch -- you think you'll be slaving away on Doom 7, but it's far more likely that you'll be fixing graphics buffer glitches in Horsez [ http://www.amazon.com/Horsez-Nintendo-DS/dp/B000GJ0J1K ].
"AAA" games, the real earthshakers like Halo and World of Warcraft, can only be made by large teams with multi-million-dollar budgets. Inescapable truth. Success in conventional game development has come to depend more and more on a corporate lifestyle: no loose cannons, no lone geniuses. Game developers have to master their C and C++ and perfect their 3D optimizations; game designers have to be very lucky, very hardworking, and very low-paid. (The design side is much harder to break into.)
Games from established studios have to be guaranteed moneymakers, mostly appealing to 15-to-35-year-old males, which is why we see lots and lots of online gunplay and me-too rhythm and karaoke games. The sudden upswing in rhythm and karaoke games points out the increasing mainstreaming of video games, though, which brings me to point 2:
Independent development. The internet has made it extremely easy to write a simple game in Flash or something and get it plastered all over the internet. You go viral with a decent business model, you can cash in, and quite a few games have already been optioned for downloadable console ports after an online success. Especially for casual games -- pick-up-and-go entertainment, usually in the puzzle category -- this can be a great road to recognition, and it's the only one available to the reclusive-genius solo programmer.
Solo development with internet distribution is also the only way to release game types that just aren't that popular these days. I've been playing a game named The Spirit Engine 2 [ http://thespiritengine.com/ ] lately; if you look at the screenshots, you can see that it's not the kind of game that would fly on the mass market.
In fact, my advice to anyone who wants to "make games" is just to make games. Don't go work for a game company. You'll do more work for less pay than you would in any other programming job, and you probably won't even scratch your game-creation itch -- you think you'll be slaving away on Doom 7, but it's far more likely that you'll be fixing graphics buffer glitches in Horsez [ http://www.amazon.com/Horsez-Nintendo-DS/dp/B000GJ0J1K ].