Video game industry

The video game industry is the economic sector involved with the design, development, marketing and sale of video and computer games. It encompasses dozens of job disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide.

Once a niche market and considered by some as a curiosity in the mid-1970s, its economic impact is now greater than that of Hollywood blockbusters.

The modern computing world owes most modern computing innovations to the game industry. The following computing elements owe their lineage and development to the game industry:

Sound cards: developed for addition of high-quality sound to games
Graphics cards: for high-speed, high-color game graphics
3D graphic accelerators: developed for high-quality 3d game graphics
UNIX: developed so the programmers could play a space traveling game

In addition, most of the highest powered personal computers are purchased by gamers who want the fastest equipment to power the latest cutting-edge games. Modern games are some of the most demanding on PC resources, so the latest hardware is often targetted at this sector likely to purchase and make use of the latest features. Thus, the intertia of CPU development is due in large part to this industry whose applications demand faster processors which traditional applications don't require.

Disciplines

The game industry employs those experienced in other traditional businesses, but some have experience tailored to the game industry. For example, many recruiters target just game industry professionals. Some of the disciplines specific to the game industry include:

Game programmer
Game designer
Level designer
Game producer
Game artist

Most of these professionals are employed by video game developers or video game publishers. However, many hobbyists also produce computer games and sell them commercially.

History

The emergence of the video game indsutry can be traced to Pong in 1971—the first widely available video game. From this point, the video and computer game industry formed into a hobby culture in the late 1970s when personal computers just began to become widely available. The industry grew along with the advancement of computing technology, and often drove that advancement. Today, the video game industry is a juggernaut of development, profit and still drives technological advancement which is then leveraged by other industry sectors. Though maturing, the video game industry is still very volatile, with third-party video game developers quickly cropping up and, just as quickly, going out of business.