Week 15! This industry moves so fast it's really hard to tell. That's why I need a name that's cutting-edge, like CutCo, EdgeCom, Interslice.

The game industry has well and truly arrived in the sense that it is a multi billion pound, profit making machine but this is not a true reflection of its current state. behind the figures lay a problem.

Games used to be fairly cheap to produce yet would still sell in great volumes and in return the profit margin was great. This, unfortunately is no longer the case. Increasingly more sophisticated platforms has breed an increasingly more sophisticated consumer which in turn requires more sophisticated games. As a result games nowadays have production costs in the millions and unlike previous years when a team may produce several games in a year, the product is taking 2 or 3 years to completed.

This applied pressure to the employees of the games industry. As mentioned the games take longer to develop and cost more than ever before as a result more and more is being asked of the talent involved in the production. It appears there is an ongoing issue with the amount of hours an employee is expected or required to put in when working on a project.

It is not all bad, the pay for example, although not stratospheric is something that has increased as a result of the growth of the industry and most employees are paid what you could call a comfortable salary.

It seems the industry is at a stage of make or break. Either it could continue to grow with the the opportunities for advancement the current generation of consoles have brought with them or in a strange twist they could herald the end. It is the expectation of the games they also bring which has pushed the production costs higher and higher and caused the problem facing the industry at the moment in the first place.

It has reached a point where the consumer is possibly more demanding than ever in terms of what they expect from a game so there doesn't really seem any way to go back. One of the ways this is being confronted is the lifespan of the consoles. The industry has learnt that progressing to fast is a costly exercise. Another challenge the industry faces is finding a way to keep a handle on the production costs so that it is possible to keep developing games to this standard with out the reduction and loss of profit it has recently been suffering.