Hey guys,
i've bumped a lot of times into this community whilst doing some research on the game industry, regarding jobs and their qualifications. So I decided to register here and ask you a few questions, as you all seem quite competent and friendly.
So first off - I'm 20 years old and currently I'm taking classes in Computer Science at a german University. I'm in the 2nd year of this 3 year bachelor. I've been playing with the idea of doing something game-related later on (best case: graphics/engine/gameplay programmer) - to transform my dream into reality, so to speak
. So I started to look around eventually.
In Great Britain, I found a MSc in 'Computer Games Technology' at a few universities. (for example
here). The duration made me wonder though - it's only 2 semesters (From my understading, a master degree is obtained after at least 4 semesters).
Also I did not find any profound statistics on beginners salary in the game industry other than GB, there it's estimated around 18000-25000 pounds (22-30k €), which seems quite low to me, compared to other programming / development jobs in the IT sector (about 35-45k€ here in Germany).
So here are my questions now:
Which graduation do I need to get a good start into the games industry, actually does graduation weigh that much in this sector at all?
Am I better off specializing to game technology or is a common MSc in Computer Science better / enough?
Are the salaries I listed realisitic? What about carreer advancement oppertunities? (I'd like to know facts about Western Europe, USA is not that relevant for me at the moment)
In conclusion here's what I have to decide with and I'm all happy about your help with this dicision:
Graduate in Computer Science BSc. then
- Computer Science MSc at my University & trying to get into game development by myself (learning C++, graphics programming etc in private-study) or...
- Computer Games Technology MSc (or something similar) and then directly trying to get into the industry or...
- Study both MSc (I mean... it's just 3 years...) or...
- Study CS MSc and apply as a graphics programmer somewhere else
You're welcome to comment anything, and I'd be very pleased, if someone helped me by answering my question,
Thanks all,
Viktor
PS: Sorry if my english sounds funny...