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[Business Bear]

In my experience, you should try to take a job that is at least somewhat removed from your work on your own games.  It helps to be able to change gears, and it won't feel like you're working 16 hour days.   

[Melly]

Haha, Lurk, that's crazy.

Reason I can't think of getting in a big game company is because:

1- I'd be working on other people's ideas, and I find it hard enough to work on my own ideas.

2- I'd be working on other people's BAD ideas, and chances are that even if I know how to fix something I'd be tossed aside because my idea isn't as profitable.

3- In the end chances are I'd be working for people who don't actually like games, just the money they can bring, and who would make awful suggestions or demands with the only intent of trying to milk more money out of the project.

4- I might have to work on sports games.

Given, I could get luck and get in the most awesome company ever with the most awesome team ever making the most awesome game ever, but I find that unlikely.

[gunswordfist]

Haha, Lurk, that's crazy.

Reason I can't think of getting in a big game company is because:

1- I'd be working on other people's ideas, and I find it hard enough to work on my own ideas.
Agreed
2- I'd be working on other people's BAD ideas, and chances are that even if I know how to fix something I'd be tossed aside because my idea isn't as profitable.
Agreed
3- In the end chances are I'd be working for people who don't actually like games, just the money they can bring, and who would make awful suggestions or demands with the only intent of trying to milk more money out of the project.
Best Buy and Wal-Mart says 'Hello!'
4- I might have to work on sports games.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Given, I could get luck and get in the most awesome company ever with the most awesome team ever making the most awesome game ever, but I find that unlikely.

[Lurk]

Melly: The team and friendships you make along the way are (most) always awesome though. This is the main thing for me, the nice people you meet and the rapid fire exchange of knowledge that helps you progress all the time. You're right about point 2 and 3. The higher you climb in the management hierarchy, the more you find those who really wanted to make movies, and failed. I've once been laughed at by an animator because I like games, old games(I was watching a snes longplay on youtube),calling me childish and nerdy; then in the evening, he was passing out invitations to go and watch 'the Incredibles'. 

Also, you NEVER give any personal idea around. You keep it and moonlight it indie style. Because 'they' are going to screw it up, a 100%. And that will make you sadder than you've ever been.

Sports game are a career killer. You will end up with absolutely nothing useful for a portfolio after you're done with it(same goes for car games). I met with an Art Director recently, about joining a project. He was telling me about his great vision, he was so passionate about doing something 'different', how others failed when they tried to do it, but he would. I was pretty cold during most of the interview, letting him do most of the talk, occasionally adding a very caustic comment to the mix. In the end, I left him, pretty sure I would'nt be working on his masterpiece(he truly hated muscly warriors and busty vixen, the main bulk of my in-house portfolio). 2 weeks later, we were both reassigned to a new project: I was happy to find I would be working with a very talented artist I'd been wanting to observe for a long time; he was assigned to a sports game. When I saw him next, his face, the sad, twisted, knowing smile. Poor guy.

[AaronAardvark]

I worked directly under Ed Kilham during my tenure at EA.  He's even more awesome than you might imagine.

There were some good memories there.  Lots of bad ones too, though.  At the end of the day I've learned this much: You can't pay me enough to force me to work in the games industry again.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை]

Obligatory reading for anyone thinking about working in the mainstream games industry: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Also, contra to what a few other people in this thread are saying, I do view the indie games industry and the mainstream games industry (as well as the casual games industry) as very different things. There are a few more too, like the Flash games industry. The business models are all very different, the games are very different, and so on.

Indie games are not just a kid brother to mainstream games or something, they're a distinct industry, and being good at making mainstream games has very little carry-over into being good at making indie games. In the former, you need to be good at one specialized thing and be as good as you possibly can be in that specialty. In the latter, you need to be a generalist, and be a little good at everything, from spriting to sound editing to marketing. So working in the mainstream games industry probably won't actually improve your ability as an indie game developer (except in the one thing that you'd specialize in).

Of course, "industry" may be a misnomer for indie games. It's more like a cottage industry than an industry. It also has much more in common with entrepreneurship than it does with the traditional way industries work with their manufacturing lines and mass production.

[Greg Game Man]

im so glad i came across the indie scene, the mainstream industry sounds shit compared to making your own games/studio

at the moment, i do flash games and im loving  it!

i plan to move onto my own studio with some friends after Uni. AWERSOMEEE

[gunswordfist]

im so glad i came across the indie scene, the mainstream industry sounds shit compared to making your own games/studio

at the moment, i do flash games and im loving  it!

i plan to move onto my own studio with some friends after Uni. AWERSOMEEE

Yeah owning your own games and studios makes pretty much anything sound like sh!t. And Good Luck with those flash games.

[Melly]

Obligatory reading for anyone thinking about working in the mainstream games industry: http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

Thanks for strengthening my resolve.

[nihilocrat]

From the stories I've heard, and experiences I've had, game companies tend to be entirely hit-or-miss. There are stellar teams, and then there are terrible ones, without much in-between. In either case, 80% of games out there, if not more, are pretty terrible and the people making them don't feel inspired about them. It's pretty much an eye-opener and great motivation to go indie if you've got the skills/team and cash.

[Hajo]

From the stories I've heard, and experiences I've had, game companies tend to be entirely hit-or-miss. There are stellar teams, and then there are terrible ones, without much in-between.

Usually there are no stories told from normal teams. Only tellworthy stories are if something is good or bad ... so if all you know are the stories, you most likely missed all the ordinary and average cases, because people prefer to tell about their good or bad experiences.

"I worked in a team in a average company, and it's been normal people, doing ordinary work" - that is usually too boring to be told, I guess.

[Lurk]

Usually there are no stories told from normal teams.

The bigger the team, the more chance you get to find a unique individual in there that gives you a good story to tell. I've worked on some very normal team, on one of them, a guy went into a meeting, sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, and said "in ten minutes, everybody dies" (or something like that, I was told by a friend who was very freaked out in that meeting). The person was escorted out to a vacation. He came back afterward, on the same project, and stayed to very late hours of the night. At some point, he lost it, tried to throw his monitor through the window (we were on the 4th floor) failed, and wrote "goodbye, it is gone" on a post-it(it's a catchphrase a very popular french sport news anchor would use while describing a baseball match, when there was a homerun). He left, and went to work abroad, where I was told he was very happy and normal. 

[gunswordfist]

Usually there are no stories told from normal teams.

The bigger the team, the more chance you get to find a unique individual in there that gives you a good story to tell. I've worked on some very normal team, on one of them, a guy went into a meeting, sat on the floor, smoking a cigarette, and said "in ten minutes, everybody dies" (or something like that, I was told by a friend who was very freaked out in that meeting). The person was escorted out to a vacation. He came back afterward, on the same project, and stayed to very late hours of the night. At some point, he lost it, tried to throw his monitor through the window (we were on the 4th floor) failed, and wrote "goodbye, it is gone" on a post-it(it's a catchphrase a very popular french sport news anchor would use while describing a baseball match, when there was a homerun). He left, and went to work abroad, where I was told he was very happy and normal. 

That's one helluva story.

[Lurk]

That's one helluva story.

I've lived something similar, a long time ago.
I was doing overtime like crazy, and at the time, I was really caring about the end product. I had too many tasks assigned and not enough time. I started experiencing changes in my sleep pattern-basically, I was sleeping around 3 hours a night, and it was'nt even real sleep, as I was rendering in my dreams: I was dreaming about a computer screen rendering 3d models. And when I would wake up, I would be sad, because I thought of all the work I did in my sleep that had gone away in the aether. I was gulping down way too many caffeine based products to stay awake, and my brain would try to compute schedules that were just impossible. For example, 50 drawings to do in a week(at the level of quality I was imposing on myself because I cared), I would just think about the number of hours in a day, then think, okay, 2 hours per drawing, I can do this, it's possible. But it just was'nt. And the overtime food ended up being always the same because the person who ordered was enamored with this cheap, repulsive bbq chicken take-out place we got in Quebec, which is just the worst meat you can feed on(but for some reason, some people really like it, must be the salt and grease). And at some point, I snapped at the guy, asking him why we could'nt order something edible for a change. He looked at me and said, 'Why? I like(restaurant's name)'. I was slowly going mad, so I was staring at his lips, and I could see them moving in slow motion, repeating the restaurant's name in my head, the moistness at the tip rolling down his chin. Then, I would hear unrelated conversations going around the office, and reorganizing the words in my mind; the new phrases had a much more sinister tone and I felt I was becoming paranoid. 
 

[gunswordfist]

That sounds very stressful. Things in life can make you get fed up.

[Lurk]

  But it makes for interesting stories afterwards .