From what I've been able to gather, it's about having a one-stop shop where you can get all your shit done. Take that 50:1 ratio.

There are a couple different ways to look at it: You're either going to be one of four people working in a massive AAA house with 200 pixelmonkeys or you're going to be the only guy at a AA shop with 50 pixelmonkeys. If you're at the AAA house, you get to specialize. But how many audio guys at AAA houses only know the mixing aspect? Or the composing aspect? And most of that they farm out anyway.

Take the little shops with one guy or five guys or eight guys. None of them are pure audio. And really - why are they going to grab your sound design rather than whatever samples they can slam into Cryengine or whatever? Since you're going to need to roll up 5 or 10 or 50 of them in order to stay gainfully employed, you're going to need to be pretty versatile.

My working assumption is you're going to be in a much better place if they can hand you a ball of code and say "audio this" and come back in a week or two. That comes from knowing code, not knowing Pro Tools.

Audiokinetic has free training, by the way. And cheap certification. FMod is a little more but I've got several thousand dollars worth of samples from Sound Librarian so I'ma see if they might maybe cut me a deal.