[MUSIC] Welcome to the Business of Games and Entrepreneurship course here on Coursera. As you know already, I'm Casey O'Donnell, one of the faculty for Michigan State University. That's part of the video game design and development specialization here on Coursera. I hope you're enjoying the course. I want to talk a little bit about, give you a sense of what this class is going to be about. Because just like all the others, some of these classes are about making games, and some of them are about the business of games or the theory behind games or where gaming design comes from. But mostly we're gonna talk about business and money. So I want to say that this topic is near and dear to my heart. So this is my book, Developer's Dilemma. No, you don't have to buy it. If you want to, that'd be great, but it's actually about the game industry because the game industry is kind of an opaque thing. Most people don't know how it works. And I think it's really important to talk about how does it work, how do you make it work? If you're interested in making games for a living, that's an important thing, even if it's just a hobby. Knowing how it works will tell you about how people get the things that they make out in the world. What are you possible distribution platforms? How are you gonna make this work for you? So it's really important class. I also think it's important to say that this isn't something that I just know about in theory. I co-founded a science learning game company, Cogent Education. So these are issues that I've had to grapple with as a game designer, as a game developer, and so I think it's important for you to understand them, too. In part, it's because whether you're making a game for fun or for business, these are things that you're going to encounter and that you're gonna have to deal with. So it's important to sort of address them head-on. So to give you a sense of how we're gonna kinda sequence the things in this class, the first thing we're gonna talk about is money, and how the game industry is structured, and how it kinda works because, that's important. We're gonna talk about legal issues that you face in game design and game development. We're going to talk about production. What does that mean? Production, project planning. How you deal with people, and how you work with team dynamics because if you are working with other people, that's gonna come up. We're also going to talk about pitching. How you pitch your game idea as well as how to get a job. Because in some ways, that's not so much pitching a game, but it's pitching you to another company. We're gonna talk about what it takes to start a company. So maybe you think you've got a great game idea. And now is your chance to actually do that, start a company. Well, we're gonna talk about that, we're gonna talk about how to build a portfolio. Because if you're selling yourself, your portfolio is what you're selling, and if you're selling a game, a business plan is how you're going to sell that thing. So these are all important things, we're gonna talk about all of them. Hope you're excited, I hope you've enjoyed the first two classes in the game design and development specialization, if you haven't checked them out, please do. We think we've got a lot of great information here that'll help you understand games, game development, and game design. Thanks, see you in the next clip. [MUSIC]