Break Into The Game Industry: How to Get A Job Making Video Games [Paperback]

In the past decade, things have changed. Its a travesty that there has been a "brain drain" from the video game design sector in the past couple of years. We need the best and the brightest to design the future placaters of the masses. Now they are no longer interested in the field because of the crazy hacks that have taken over, rescinded the protocol and the bucked the accountability. Buy this book now.

This book was basically a waste of money, because it only gives you general information that most people already know. For example on page 189 the section "How to find a Job" starts. The first paragraph is a "its not what you know, its WHO you know." section. How is that supposed to help recent graduates or professionals changing professions?

In short, this book is NOT for professionals or graduates. It might be useful to high school students, who need might need to learn how to focus their career goals towards an game career... but even then i am not sure how it would help when they get to the position of actually trying to get the job.

TOTALLY DISSATISFIED, and WISH I could get my money back! This was a highway robbery at its best.

If you want more indepth information than that however, this book is for you.

Why?
1) Everything is clearly broken down into sections very cleanly. Nice index and appendix makes it easy to reference.
2) Covers every possible angle - whether you're young, a college graduate or already working in another industry and deals with your strengths and weaknesses
3) Well written and substantiated by interviews with industry professionals (from game designers to game industry job recruiters)

No words are wasted in this. Every word holds some meaning. I was suprised at the breakdown on minority groups, different ethnic groups and gender issues in the gaming industry. I felt this chapter alone (whilst not necessarily relevant to me) increased it's target audience substantially by tackling a lot of issues that not a lot of authors have considered.

A lot of other books out there are a collection of interviews with various game developer professionals and often their answers are disjointed and do not answer the question directly, if at all. This does not make these books any "less" valuable, only a little bit harder to find the information you might be looking for.

If you want a nice, clean, crisp and concise book on breaking into the game industry, this is the book for you. My only gripe about this book was that I felt it was rather short (largely personal perception, I understand that). That said, it did cover everything you could possibly think of (short of building your own game company, but that's a topic for another book I think) so do bear that in mind, hence my rating.