MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
From provocative comments on our recent stories about the industry skills shortage through to reports in the mainstream press, the matter of education and games development is still a hot topic – but is the rising average age of coders and artists holding back the workforce?
One anonymous development exec thinks so, speaking in response to the Games Up campaign to silicon.com.
Their source is quoted as saying: "Anyone that’s over 28 or so hasn’t really come through that education path. They’ve taught themselves, they’ve been on courses that aren’t necessarily video game courses – they may be maths or engineering or more general purpose software engineering."
The source adds that the bedroom coding culture helped contribute to the industry’s rise to power, but its absence means less people are getting into games.
"Whereas now people don’t really understand all those basics; they don’t really know what’s going on under the hood… That’s where the real discrepancy comes."
They add: "The industry’s aging. The older people are sort of staying with it. It used to be all 20-year-olds or whatever but now it’s a lot of people in their late 30s.
"Because the US economy is depressed it’s cheaper to develop there and people are looking at other places – everyone’s setting up studios in Shanghai and Eastern Europe at the moment."
