The industry as of now

Like any industry the games industry is growing faster than anyone could have predicted, once purely the realm of the talented bed room coder the games industry itself has warped and transformed into a global industry employing thousands and thousands of specialised people much the same way the film indsutry began to diversify as talkies started; the increasing complexity and additional rise in development costs has meant development houses have had to outsoruce much of the work to third parties usualy located in poorer countries were the wages are generally lower, great news if you've just started a game art course, with the prevalance of the internet many people can now work as contractors for hire moving from one developer to another producing a specified model when requested a good example of this would be the poop in my mouth chap
who has built up a solid portfolio of work for potential clients - this global bulletin board is great for attracting much more potential employment but it also places you in competition with every other would be game artist.
This decentrilisation of development houses could mean that people who work together for many months of possibly years may never meet face to face - im not sure of the outcome of this but having a global pool of talent instead of the people who could get to the offices each day could have an enormous increase in the games quality or it could make it a confusing mess like Splinter Cell: Pandora's tommorow the multiplayer element being developed in Shanghai and bearing little relation to the main game. Communication is always key it would seem be it if the person is across the room or across the continent.

Course as games do become more expensive and longer to create publishers are going to want to see a profit to this title however many million's they've poured into game X - a prime example would be publisher EA until recently working overtime there was considered normal and developers worked long in to the night getting a title complete before its projected release date, if a game misses the holiday scheudule there bound to make less but when anything is rushed the quality suffers.
This increasing rush to get games out and recylcing the same idea's means games are slowly but surely losing there creative appeal to many. Additonally developers at EA signed a lawsuit against EA alleging they had not payed them for working hundreds of hours of overtime, images of some developement sweat house are hard not to imagine.