Talent Tussle : Video Game Industry’s Behind-the-Screen Competition Is Intense
Late last year, David Perry embarked on a trip around the country, stopping in New York, Chicago and other big cities to deliver two messages--both self-serving in their own way--to high school students.
First, he urged the students to buy his company’s latest video game, Earthworm Jim. Apparently, they listened. The game has since sold more than a million copies, becoming one of the industry’s biggest recent hits.
Second, he pleaded with the students to consider careers in the game industry, possibly even someday joining him at his Laguna Beach company, Shiny Entertainment. “I gave a 40-minute speech on how our company works, what the job looks like,” said Perry, a 6-foot-8 native of Northern Ireland. “We need people so badly.”
How students respond to that request won’t be evident for another few years. In the meantime, Perry and other video game producers will continue to confront a perplexing problem: It is far easier to find people to play video games these days than it is to find people who can make them.
At Shiny Entertainment and throughout the computer game industry, the quest for talent has become an outright scramble over the past two years, fueled by the explosion in popularity of personal computers, the emergence of CD-ROM technology, and the influx of movie studios salivating over the prospects of conquering a new medium.
Competition for talent “is at an all-time high,” said Brian Fargo, chief executive and founder of Interplay Productions Inc., a game company in Irvine with about 300 employees.
“Headhunters go through your offices extension by extension,” he said. “And I can’t tell you how many times we’ve hired a headhunter to get us talent, and a week later the same headhunter tries to get our own people away from us.”
For game companies, the scarcity of talent has driven up payroll costs, squeezed profit margins and, in some cases, led to costly production delays.
For the producers, artists and programmers whose skills are in such demand, the feeding frenzy has padded both their egos and bank accounts. They field dozens of calls each year from commission-hungry recruiters, and can command 40% pay raises simply to switch companies.
Consider Kevin Toft, who five years ago was a 20-year-old artist making $6 an hour painting background scenes for a Laguna Beach art festival. Now he draws background scenes--using computer drawing programs--for video games, and his income has soared to about $55,000 a year.
“Back in high school, I never thought I would get a job as an artist,” Toft said.
Until last year, he and co-worker Allyn Welty were both doing animation work for Virgin Interactive Entertainment, another Irvine-based company that produced popular video game spinoffs of “Aladdin” and other movies.
But in a scene replayed dozens of times every day in the industry, they were approached by a sweet-talking headhunter. Soon, they were interviewing at Sony Interactive Studios in San Diego, where they now work side by side.
“I came down [to San Diego] and they put me up in a lovely hotel in La Jolla,” said Welty, 25. “They said, ‘What do you want?’ I just made up a number--about a $20,000-a-year raise--and they bit. I was going, ‘Shoot, I should have asked for more.’ ”
Welty is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where she earned a degree in illustration. But many programmers and artists have little or no formal training, much less a college degree. Industry officials say the lack of a reliable talent pipeline is one reason why it’s so difficult to fill jobs.
But the shortages have grown more acute as companies large and small have rushed into the industry, which racked up $6 billion in worldwide sales last year. For example, DreamWorks SKG, the studio launched by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, set out to hire 75 artists and programmers earlier this year for its software entertainment unit.
The scramble for talent has been a boon for headhunters who specialize in filling jobs in the computer game industry.
“There’s so much business out there we can’t get to it all,” said Paul Cunningham, a Redondo Beach-based headhunter who estimated that he makes an average of 70 recruiting calls a day. He places three or four people a month, collecting fees ranging from $10,000 to more than $30,000 for each position that he fills.
Ironically, rapid technological advances have made game development more labor intensive, exacerbating the shortage of talent. The cartridges that contained the most popular games of the past 10 years are giving way to CD-ROMs that can store hundreds of times more data. As a result, companies are racing to fill that added space with more sights and sounds.
Earthworm Jim, for example, was made up of about 3,000 frames of animation, or separate computer images, said Perry of Shiny Entertainment. But the next generation of games could take up to 30,000 frames, he said, “which means having to use more people.”
Scott Guest, 25, is one of the hottest commodities in the game world--a programmer who specializes in writing the complex software that powers an upcoming generation of games with three-dimensional visual effects.
Guest is a member of a large contingent of California-based programmers who came from Britain. “It’s colder there, so you sit inside and play with your computer more,” Guest explained. “Over here, you surf.”
Virgin recruited Guest from Britain two years ago, luring him with the promise of sunny Southern California weather and an $80,000 annual salary. Today, he’s already making $110,000 a year, partly because Virgin has had to match the lucrative offers Guest frequently receives from other companies.
Virgin and many other companies say they lose 20% of their employees every year.
That kind of turnover is fueled by people like Jesse Taylor, 31, a game producer who has switched jobs six times in his eight-year career. Most of that time was spent hopping around the San Francisco area, where he started as a free-lance programmer and worked his way up to producing games, managing all of the facets of development.
“Every time I switched jobs, the pay would typically go up about 30% to 50%,” Taylor said. “The best way to get more money or to get a better job is to move. That’s just the nature of this industry.”
Taylor is currently an executive game producer at Virgin with an annual salary of about $150,000 a year. Though he’s been with the company just three weeks, he’s already taken several calls from recruiters. “They call me and say, ‘Jesse, how are you doing? Are you happy?’ ” he said.
Taylor and others are quick to point out that though their salaries are enviable, the work they do is difficult and exhausting. Few work less than 50 hours a week, and 100-hour weeks are common when production deadlines loom.
And even though the industry is starved for talent, employers are looking only for legitimate “gamers,” employees who have conquered every game since the prehistoric Pong, and bring a single-minded devotion to their craft.
The desperate search for these qualities has led to a 40% increase in average salaries over the past two years, according to recruiters and industry analysts. That has taken its toll on the bottom line, considering the fact that labor typically accounts for 70% of the development costs of a game.
The scarcity of talent “drives costs up and forces you to take bets on people who don’t have the experience,” said Christopher Yates, vice president of technology and operations at Virgin. It can also lead to costly disruptions in the development of key products.
Yates and others say the huge gap between the demand and supply of talent can’t go unbridged forever, but no one is quite sure how to close it. Some companies, including Virgin, have started signing employees to short-term contracts, something most companies in this topsy-turvy industry have been reluctant to do. Others are waiting for widespread industry consolidation to slow the bidding wars.
Perry, Shiny’s founder, would seem to be the perfect model for a recruiting brochure. A self-taught programmer with no college degree, he is a multimillionaire at age 28, with a fleet of sports cars in his driveway, and a view of the ocean from his Laguna Beach office.
But Perry has seven headhunters helping him find recruits for his 15-employee company. Four of his best animators recently left to start their own company, and he also would like to hire 10 new employees so that Shiny can go from making one game a year to two.
“Ten workers doesn’t sound like much,” Perry said. “But first you have to find those people. And then you have to be bloody nice to them because the next week they’ll have a headhunter on the phone asking, ‘Are you sure you’re happy?’ ”
