Howdy everybody! I hope you’ve had a good week! Along the same lines of last week’s blog about the Business Administration portion of my CS/BA degree, I want to keep the spotlight on my Business activities this week. In particular, I want to tell you guys about my newest club venture, the USC Games Business Club.
As you know from some of my previous blogs here, here, and here, I’ve taken up a minor in Video Game Programming as it is an area that I find very exciting and with huge potential. However, my interest in games goes beyond just designing and building them and extends into the field of managing their production and promotion. In this area, two good friends of mine, Stevie and Grant, and I have decided to create a new USC Student Organization for the business of video games.
Our main goal is to provide an environment where those interested in pursuing video games professionally in both the managerial and the design paths can come together and learn more about the current state of the industry while making important connections to their peers that will help them throughout their career. One way in which we plan to stay up-to-date with the state of the industry is to bring in current professionals in the field, both from the design field and the business field. With these professionals, including our faculty advisor – USC Games professor Anthony Borquez – we will have them give talks on trends they see in the current market and how they model their businesses and projects. We will also have mock (or real!) projects where we can break people up into teams and have them each design their own business model, whether currently existing or a new style of their own! Once we have these models and business plans, our professionals can give us their input on how they would structure a model and why as well as feedback on the various models proposed. In addition to this, we plan to build a network of business-minded individuals that can act as consultants and partners with designers and developers in the Makers Of Entertaining Games Association (MEGA) to both provide resources to the developers in order to market and monetize their games as well as giving valuable experience and portfolio projects to those who are not as interested in the programming and actual building of the game. Finally, another large area of attraction for this club is to be the official USC volunteers for large industry conferences such as E3, Comic-Con, and GDC. This would provide members with a hands-on experience to the products currently being developed in the industry as well as a direct look into those companies’ business models.
Overall, the club is designed to bring together students who want to work professionally in the video game industry and provide them with valuable experiences to build their portfolios, knowledge-base, and peer networks. While Stevie has taken the lead with the University relations and the club was his initial idea, it has been a great experience to work with him and Grant on further developing our goals and events. I’m really excited to get our first meetings underway as we are in the final steps of creating the club. We have already been recognized by the University and have a lot of momentum going our way! Keep an eye out in my blogs for more details if this sounds like something you’d be interested in, and feel free to contact me directly if you’d like to get involved!
Until next time!
~Patrick
