What is the job out look on video game design

Video games in general are still a growing entertainment market and demand is high for professionals in the industry.

However there are two factors to keep in mind:

The first thing to understand is that 'Video game designer' is a very general term; most jobs in the industry require a much more specialized skill set:

Writer, artist, tester, programer, 3d model maker, etc; these are all jobs within the game design industry that are in constant demand.

Quite litterally anyone can call themselves a game designer and nearly anyone can pitch a basic game concept; that by itself is not a skill which will get you anywhere. You will need a focused specialty to be of any value in a larger company before moving up to a position where you are actually 'designing a game' rather than simply working on components of it that have been assigned to you.

That's just how large game companies work: They have a small team of 'designers' who have moved up the ranks from various other specialties and are now allowed to 'lead' a large group of people with a variety of focused talents.

The only way around that would be small scale or independent game development, in which case you will need all of those skills plus an entrepreneurial spirit and some business sense to launch your own games outside of a large company setting.

The second thing to keep in mind: quality is always in demand.

Most of the jobs available in the game industry are not specific to the game industry.

For example a talented artist can work on video games, movies, comics, and any other medium as well. The key here is: talented. There are millions of OK artists in the world, there are comparably few really good ones.

Same goes for any other position in the game industry; a quality programer can write code for games or code for monitoring the next NASA space launch, a networking guru can write the next great multi-player game server code or work on telecom satellites. These are not industry specific skills but rather talents that also happen to be in demand by game companies.

So in summary, the overall job outlook in the video game industry is high, mainly because they require real skills and talents and also because they share the same pool of talent with other industries.

But to actually label yourself as a video game designer is a niche that combines many talents and is open only at the highest level within a company. (unless you start your own and put yourself there)