Seek and Employ: Gamer jobs open at Taiwan Game Show

Taiwanese companies held a job fair to find graphics artists, programmers and even full time players to help develop games

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Over a dozen companies banded together with an online job service in Taipei over the weekend to seek people for the island's computer and online game industries. Some of the jobs even pay gamers to play full-time.

Many of the jobs on offer from 15 gaming companies at the 2011 Taipei Game Show were for research and development, game design, graphics art, and software engineering. But some jobs offered the chance to play computer games for a living with a salary of around NT$35,000 (US$1,194) a month, which is about average in Taiwan.

"We're looking for around 50 people, including gamers, programmers, graphics artists and research and development," said Jamesina Lin, a representative at Chinese Gamer International, one of Taiwan's biggest online gaming companies.

People hired to play games would be heavily involved in game development, she said.

Chinese Gamer and other companies teamed with Taiwanese employment website, Job Bank, to host the Taiwan Game Job fair at the same time as Taipei's biggest gaming show.

"We had over 2,000 people apply at the job fair on Saturday and over 2,600 applications in all," said Charlene Chang, spokesperson for Job Bank, which ran the job fair.

Taiwanese gaming companies are serious about their work.

Although the local gaming market in Taiwan is growing at a fast clip, the ultimate goal for most Taiwanese gaming companies is to reach the massive audience in China, which shares a language and culture similar to Taiwan's.

Taiwan's game industry was worth NT$42.2 billion last year, up nearly 20 percent over 2009, when it reached NT$35.4 billion, according to figures from the Taiwan government's Industrial Development Bureau. The range of ways to consume games has spurred growth in the industry, from PCs, game consoles and online games, to smartphones, games on social networking sites such as Facebook and more.

Taiwan's potential gaming market is much smaller than China's. Whereas Taiwan's entire population is estimated at just over 23 million, China's is over 1.33 billion, with 457 million Internet users at the end of last year, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.