Hi All,
I was reading the replies and decided to add some of my ideas about making money in game industry.

First thing, the game industry in not very big as we think, but there are plenty of opportunities with many constrains. Well, lets talk about the constrains. All the popular games are written in VC++ using Microsoft DirectX components. If you look at the releases, Microsoft is releasing a new IDE almost every year, starting from VS6 - VS.Net 08 and the Microsoft VC++ supported by the IDEs is not always backward compatible and not open source. Side by side they have .Net 1.1 - .Net 3.0 including DirectX 7.X - 10.X.Its very difficult for the developers to learn and implement all the new technologies. If you want to open a Game Company you need to provide a lot of extra effort to train your developers.
The GDLC (Game development life cycle) is different than our normal SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). It has divided into many import parts like 1. Story 2. Feature Creation (Artists) 3.AI 4.Game Engine 5. Core 3D Development(Graphics) 6. Network.
Your game might be a flop if any of these does not meet users expectation. I was quite a bit involved in Game Programming using DirectX 9.0c and I believe Game Programming is one of the toughest job in the programming world and you have to highly imaginative to please the gamers. If you have confident you can really do something great but its difficult to stay long in Game industry unless you have a high budget.

But, if you can do something that nobody has done before .. you have a great future.
Couple of games in mid 90's became very popular just for the innovative ideas .. like Prince of Persia, Doom, wolfenstein Snake etc

 

 

 

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Well, what I've gathered is that you want to start a business that offers online/LAN games to be played at an hourly rate. There may be some legal issues that you would have to deal with. First off, you would have to ensure that the company that created the game doesn't restrict people from doing this in their EULA. Some companies do (Microsoft/Bungie's Halo is one of them I think). With regards to World of Warcraft which was mentioned earlier, I'm fairly certain that an account is to be used by one person only, not a group of people. Before attempting to start something like this it's very important to do research into the legal restrictions that might apply.

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hey if you are talking about starting an internet gaming portal than you should have some knowledge of that field may be basic but you should have such knowledge to tackle the day to day affairs of the site.
first you need good hosting and a domain of course and than you need some gaming scripts which would make your work far more easier and if you could afford a good advertising before its lunch is a must.

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Hah, if it is just gaming industry, why dont you create a gaming networking site where all game updates are there. For example: GameSpot

GameSpot has subscription service where money is involved there....

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Maybe first you should take knowledge of how network games work then try learning how arcade games network like gamespy and other online game servers work.

Try learning the network game working and creating mod that let you connect to diff server,this is the palce you want to digg in right.

the secret is if you want to be someone find someone who is already done what you did."Mistyped quote apologize" but take it sense you want.

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im trying to get into the same bussiness
it takes many hrs of devotion


Good Luck!

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hmmm... There are lots of gaming websites on the net today. And it will be hard to compete with them. But if you are an enthusiast (not just in gaming but also in business), then you can start a free games portal. The word "FREE"; because you dont charge people to play any games but you may want to put ads on the pages... But as I said there are too many websites with the same concept already.

But there are other things you could do like put forums on your site and maybe chat as you play system or something. (This again requires that you pay a lot of money for the hosting anyway).

Good luck!

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hey all im actually starting a game company there are five of us right now and we r working on some stuff to show at gdc

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or start your own legal server ! for world of warcraft or gunz online etc.

you could gain much $$ if you get many ppl to your own privat server! so you could sell Premium Points , Items etc

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