My favourite game genre is quest/adventure and I am a C++ game programmer and game designer from Europe.
I visited a lot of job search & employment websites, but did not find any with a function to search a company by genre preferences. Such prefered genres are defined by company's released titles, current active projects, etc.
Do you know such companies or search sites? Which search strategies would you recommend?
This data is hardly standardized. On top of that, most companies aren't completely open with what they're working on. Just because company X shipped a certain kind of game in the past, doesn't mean they're working on that kind of game now or in the future. I mean for some companies it's pretty obvious, but for others not so much.
So I doubt you'll find such a site.
Personally I'd much rather find a place that has a corporate culture I'm interested in than one that's working on some predetermined type of game.
Not only are games difficult to fit into genres as such, studios do not always produce just one kind of game. Even further, I doubt you'll find it significantly more interesting to produce one kind of game over another with time in the industry.
Your best shot with this is to look up a company with a vacancy, that you would like to work for (take Frictional Games for an example), and check up their previous titles (Amnesia, Penumbra) and their genres (horror/survival).
As a general rule, if you do not have the time to check up a bit about the company, I doubt the company will care much for you since you don't have the time to put some effort in.
http://gamedevmap.com/ has break down by very very granular "genres". Bit of a stretch, but thats about the best you are going to find. Aside from MMO vs. non-MMO (and even that distinction is dropping slowly) companies rarely only handle one kind of game.
For programmers and artists the actual genre of the game, if that work even means anything these days, has zero impact on the job, and for designers there are still much bigger factors you should look at (these days the casual<->hardcore<->serious spectrum is probably the first thing I would look at as a designer).
Also if you think you would only be happy working on one type of game then I'm sorry to tell you that this industry really isn't for you.
You do realise that when you're in game development you won't be playing many games? That most likely you'll quickly come to loath playing games because you have to test little bits of them over and over again to analyse errors?
You seem under the impression that working at a game development shop means you're just going to be paid to do what you like to do now, play a certain genre of game when and how you like to do it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. You're going to be spending a lot of time not playing games but in exhaustive meetings about minute details about them. The rest of the time will be spent working on implementing or testing those minute details, and if that includes any playing it'll be playing the same little bit of the game over and over again to test that little detail you happen to have been assigned to working on. It's a job no different from any other, and any job can quickly destroy what enjoyment you have in the thing you're doing. Which is why I always advise people to NOT try to turn their hobbies into their jobs.
