The Game Industry

At the moment the games industry is in a bit of a mess. Due to the credit crunch, companies have been going bust, resulting in thousands of people loosing their jobs. Just think, if one company has 3 or 5 studios, that's a lot of people who are going to be job hunting, as well as the several thousand graduates from university courses around the world. Midway are currently in debt by $75 million, which has to be paid back before February 12th.
Despite all of this, the actual sales of games and consoles are thriving. For example, Sony have witnessed a 115% increase of sales on the Playstation 3 over the past year. As well as this, 3.25 million units of Nintendo Wii's were sold in December alone. This shows that the demand for consoles and new games are still high, and so hopefully companies will always have something to produce and profit from in the near future.
Anyway, back onto employment. Another thing that is going to make life tough for graduates is due to work being outsourced. This meaning that talent is found in country's outside the US/EU, where the labour rates are lower. Of course, this is good for the companies as it saves them money, the contract is usually only for one part of a game, rather than employing someone full time.
Hopefully by the time I graduate, if if graduate, the credit crunch will have cleared up and more studios will have opened. Ideally i'd like to get into the industry straight away, rather than spending a decade working in Tescos searching.