Question: How does one get a job in the game development industry? I’m talking about a right out of college, little-to-no experience person who otherwise has great qualifications (programming, creative writing, availability, etc). Where does this person go? How does s/he get started in such a way as to be able to start putting food on the table and pay off those school loans?
Nobody ever wants to hear this, but…be a game tester.
Generally, I’d have to agree with Sparky. However, if you can program, there’s a chance you’d be able to get a job as a programmer, rather than as a tester. Just send out your resume to a bunch of companies, along with a juicy personalized cover letter. No real “way” to do it.
You’re already halfway there… you live in California. My experience is that living anywhere but Texas or California (or be willing to move there), the prospects of landing a development job are nearly nil unless you’ve got your own venture capital.
–Dave
[ol]
[li]Send out as many resumes to as many game companies are you can
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[li]Join your local IGDA chapter and get involved. You’d be surprised how many contacts you can get from this.
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[li]Join gamasutra.com
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[li]Until they actually release a game, instead of just threatening to do so, don’t bother with the bunch of time wasters over at Garage Games.
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[li]Buy a LOT of books on game development and design, depending on your career path of choice. Plan on reading them. All of them. Twice.
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[li]Write up your own Eulogy about how best you’d like to be remembered, back when you were young. Keep this in a safe place. By the time you get to be my age, you’ll thank me for this insight.
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Pound the pavement online. Find as many game company web sites as you can (I know gamejobs.com used to have a directory, not sure if they still do), visit their sites, and check their “help wanted” sections directly. (a lot of times positions aren’t advertised on Gamasutra, I’ve found) If you find positions you think you may be qualified for, just apply to the company directly. From here on out, the usual job-hunting tips apply.
BTW, I’m assuming when you say “little-to-no experience” you mean little to no professional experience. Hobby/amateur level game programming experience is pretty much required for programming jobs in lieu of professional experience.
You have any friends at game companies? A referral will get you further than a stellar skillset ever will.
- Alan
another note: don’t expect to be able to pay off student loans on what a games company will pay you.
Alan is right, a referral is the best way in.
Further, unless you’ve just graduated from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, or another high-end college, you won’t be able to get even an interview for a programmer position unless you have already built your own engine that works.
Another point: only 3% of the industry actually gets to “design”. The other 97% is trying to get into those positions. Unless you have built up a large fortune, or have become famous in another industry and the company is looking to marry your name to a product, then, as an outsider, you shouldn’t be setting your sites on the prime positions quite yet.
Mark Mencher just published a book about getting a job in the games industry. Here’s the amazon link
A final note: don’t use recruiters or headhunters unless you’ve shipped 3 games or more. As a newcomer in the industry, you will only be qualified for the entry level positions. Using a recruiter automatically tacks on an extra 15-20% to your salary (that’s how they get paid), which companies won’t want to pay for those jobs. Further, if you send a copy of your resume to a company, and a recruiter has already spammed them with your resume, the resume from the recruiter takes precedence and the recruiter can sue the game company for lost profits if they hire you on without paying the recruiter’s fee.
sorry for the chaotic post…
John
ack! I’d forgotten about Mark’s book. In fact, I had lunch with him and other IGDA board members last Thursday. Thats the first time I saw his book (he had a sample with him). I’ve already ordered it from Amazon. It looks good.
A final note: don’t use recruiters or headhunters unless you’ve shipped 3 games or more. As a newcomer in the industry, you will only be qualified for the entry level positions. Using a recruiter automatically tacks on an extra 15-20% to your salary (that’s how they get paid), which companies won’t want to pay for those jobs.
Good advice that!!
Further, if you send a copy of your resume to a company, and a recruiter has already spammed them with your resume, the resume from the recruiter takes precedence and the recruiter can sue the game company for lost profits if they hire you on without paying the recruiter’s fee.
Yep. In fact, I recently became aware (a few months back) of a behind-the-scenes cockfight exactly like this. And it was a big name dev too.
sorry for the chaotic post…
heh, looked fine to me. Excellent points all around. But then again, maybe I’m just a chaotic kinda guy? :D
I preordered Mark’s book, as well. It ought to arrive today or tomorrow and take its place on the bottom of the huge stack of industry-related books that keep coming in. :-)
If I had to recommend one book, though, it’d be Bob Bate’s book on game design. It might be a little basic, and industry professionals won’t see much new there, but for a solid understanding of the industry as it is right now, it’s a good book to read.
link
As for all my good points in my post, I owe all I know to Dave Weinstein. We did a roundtable last GDC on how to get jobs in the industry, and I learned way more than I naively came in with.
Untrue.
But I may quote you anyway.
–Dave
Sorry to be nagative about this, but…
My advice to anyone wanting to get in the games business is…don’t.
Most developers, around the world, not just in the U.S. work ridiculously long hours at crunch time. I mean 80 - 100 hours work weeks some times, 7 days a week for 6 months to meet a beta date. I do not have any official statistics on this, but of all my years in the industry, the divorce rate is very high because no woman and familiy is going to put up with you sleeping at work for weeks on end. Burn out is very, very high in this industry. I work on a AAA product with 35 engineers and 14 artists. Not one of them, not a one, is over 33. Because as soon as you get married, smarten up and realise there is more money to be made in DB managment or IT with its 9 - 6 hours, you’ll get the hell out.
Don’t plan on retiring when you’re 40 and catching up on all the time you’re going to miss. There are a ton of games in the channel these days, and more than half of them never make a profit. Most console and PC publishers work on a 1:3 hit:miss ratio, meaning they look for one game to do well enough to pay for the three that aren’t going to make a profit. The result is that royalty checks are very rare for rank and file programmers and artists. And given the mercurial nature of the business (for every high-profile Looking Glass shattering, there’s plenty of smaller companies that make one game and disappear. Mumbo Jumbo, Inifinite Machine, etc.) you could find yourself out of job after a missed milestone. It’s no fun living in the Bay Area with no income. If you start your own studio and develop your own IP, you can make serious bucks. That’s a big “if”.
If you live, breathe, and eat videogames and this is your life’s goal, then obviously you should do it as nothing else will make you happy. But you’ll make more money and have an easy life writing drivers for some hardware company than you ever will programming animation calls or designing levels. It’s a tough, tough business.
The above makes me think there’s something seriously wrong with the business model of gaming.
It is the model for most hit driven industries. Ignore the stars and look at the working bands or bit actors. Not too glamerous (except for Tom).
Chet
This is true, but it doesn’t have to be like this. I talked to some people at Monolith what crunch time was like for No One Lives Forever and the sequel, and they said they mostly put in 40 hour weeks, very few weekends. They pre-plan everything and are apparently incredibly efficient. And it’s not like NOLF2 is a particularly content-free game.
I don’t mean to be glib, but what career doesn’t involve working those sort of hours, at least occasionally? Maybe if you want to lift heavy blocks all day you can work 40 hours a week (and there’s nothing wrong with that - I did it for 5 years), but in any competitive, professional field you’re pretty much obligated to work 60+ hours normally, and considerably more than that for extended periods of time.
My suggestion would just be to ensure you like what you’re doing, whatever that is (and regardless of the hours). You’re far more likely to be satisfied with something you really enjoy doing, regardless of the hours.
Stefan
I don’t know where the poster above worked, but either the post was exaggerated or they worked at the worst game dev. in the biz.
There’s a wide variety of environments, pay scales, etc., but based on my observations of other companies (and my own), it would appear that if you average out the crunch times and the regular times, most game devs work 10-30% more hours than normal folks, for 5-20% less pay than they’d get in a comparable position outside the industry. There are exceptions off both ends of the bell curve, but I think those numbers are pretty close.
So, yes, you’ll probably work a little harder, for a little less pay, but the payoff is that working in games IS much more fun than database development (which I did for 3 years before going into games), and there are a lot more people who want to work in games than there are jobs, so those who succeed make a few sacrifices.
Still, when you consider that you’ll spend about a third of your waking hours at your job, there is real merit to doing something you love that’s fun, even if you could make a little more writing Oracle apps.
And at our small company (13 people), we have a fairly even spread in age from 22 to 40, with almost half the folks 32 or older, and almost all are married or in serious long term relationships. Yes you can have a life.
Phil Steinmeyer
PopTop Software, Inc.
Very, very true. Still, there’s a big difference between 60+ hours and 100+ hours… like the difference between “marriage” and “divorce.” ;)
100+ hour weeks are insane. I know they happen, but (at least with all the companies I’ve been around) they rarely occur. The closest I’ve ever been was a 95-hour week… if your wife/significant other doesn’t love you enough to stay with you through these grueling periods… well… you get the picture.
The whole thing comes down to luck or who you know. It has to.
Let me relate an anecdote/whine as to why:
I was turned down for a job as a QA tester at Ensemble. They said I didn’t have enough experience. Yes, that’s what they said. Even though I went to West Point and made Dean’s List every semester (which sure isn’t easy) on my way to a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, I apparently do not have what it takes to fill an open QA position. Testing Age of Mythology is obviously a much more complex task and requires more attention to detail than some idiot like me is capable of.
I don’t even get e-mailed back for a programmer job.
80-100 hour work weeks? I don’t care. I used to do 168 hour weeks while wearing a kevlar helmet outside in the cold.
I don’t hold much hope for getting a job in the game industry. The developers are about as good at recruiting as the publishers are at picking which projects to greenlight.