On 4/7/2018 at 6:22 AM, Ilenora said:
What trends and technologies do you think will be arising within the next 3 years and how will that impact the gaming industry?
A minor quibble: in most groups gaming = gambling, games = entertainment. Tech is always advancing in games.
VR has been on the rise and keeps trending up. It may not be today's hardware that explodes, but the industry seems to have finally hit critical mass. It's been 25 years since the Virtual Boy and this is really the first time there have been a series of commercial successes.
Mobile games have been trending down and will likely continue to do so. The market is still enormous, but viable products are trending down.
Required skills will change slightly, but the market as a whole is enormous, so neither will be major shifts.
On 4/7/2018 at 6:22 AM, Ilenora said:
What skills and knowledge are required to enter and maintain a career in games?
Depends on the career. Programming? Modeling? Texturing? Animating? Testing? Design? Production?
Engineering and art disciplines generally require a bachelors degree or equivalent in most of the world. Design and production are generally senior-level positions, because you don't get put in charge of a $10M portion of a game as a beginner, although there are some jobs like associate producer and level design that are occasionally filled by industry beginners.
On 4/7/2018 at 6:22 AM, Ilenora said:
Can anyone recommend a 'professional activity' for me to engage in, eg a gaming magazine I can subscribe to or a free webinar or workshop I could view?
If you're considering the programming track, this site can be of value. We tend to focus on students and budding developers, but there are plenty of industry vets.
Professionals do their work behind closed doors. Console vendors protect everything behind multiple agreements, and violating them can destroy a developer's career. Individual studios protect their products vigorously before release, and even when people are cleared to discuss them developers are generally limited to publicly visible stuff, and discouraged from revealing anything that isn't publicly visible.
You can review various game conference proceedings, but apart from a few technical presentations most industry conferences are places for production folk to make announcements. Game developers who are able to publish their works generally do so in IEEE and ACM conferences like SIGGGRAPH, SIGCHI, InfoVis, and similar.
