Though it was once the stuff of daydreams, making video games for a living is becoming an increasingly viable career option. Triple-A studios have already brought enough revenue into the growing game industry to surpass the film and music industries combined, and serious indies continue to gain momentum. With the right skills and a smart strategy, aspiring creators have more opportunities to land their dream job than ever before. Here are 5 tips on how to get into the gaming industry.
Location, Location, Location
To quickly gauge your own level of commitment, ask yourself the following: would I leave everything and everyone behind and move to a new city if it meant I could work in the video game industry? This is reality for countless designers, developers, and artists who work on games.
For better or worse, game studios are generally clustered in specific major cities, both in the United States and around the world. In one power rankings list published by GameJobHunter, The San Francisco Bay Area topped the list for North America, having 113 major studios, while St. Louis didn’t make the 24-city list at all.
Don’t waste away in a dead zone, wondering how to get into the video game industry; you have to be where the jobs are.
Note: Make sure you’ve done your homework about the risks inherent in working in the game industry. Layoffs and turnover are an unfortunate reality, and your plan needs to take those possibilities into account.
Embrace New Platforms and Technologies
When trying to break into games, you’ll almost always be at a disadvantage when competing with current industry professionals with valuable experience. To combat this tendency, jump ahead of the old pros when the tools of the trade change.
Recent years have seen the arrival of new VR headsets, the Amazon Lumberyard game engine, and the Swift programming language. The harder you look, the more future resume bullet points you can identify that don’t yet have any experts. Pick one, do some hard work, and make something amazing with it!
Which brings us to the next tip:
Don’t Wait to Make Games
Plenty of game industry pros never worried about how to get started in the video game industry, they just started making games. When you land the big interview, you only have a few ways to impress a hiring manager. If you don’t have industry experience, an advanced degree and a description of your skills may not be enough. In these situations, what you’ve created may make all the difference.
Develop games, demos, and portfolio pieces alone or with friends. Demonstrate that you’re passionate about the work you want to do, and do it with or without them. You may discover a passion for independent game development, which will unlock a whole new world of opportunities to make money making games.
Be a Well-Rounded Candidate
This may seem counterintuitive, but you shouldn’t expect game studios to take an interest in you based on your obsession with playing (or even with making) video games.
Consider this: are you most interested in games that seem like they were programmed exceptionally well and most closely resemble other games you like? Probably not. The most widely-acclaimed games tell incredible stories, introduce us to beautiful new music, and introduce novel ideas and mechanics. Many of these influences don’t come from games at all. For this reason, top studios are infinitely more likely to hire a qualified candidate that nurtures a variety of interests and draws from unique life experiences.
This is one reason game studio employers still place plenty of emphasis on graduates with traditional IT and arts degrees, rather than focusing on applicants from strictly game-focused degree courses. In many cases, game industry professionals studied something completely unrelated to their field, or nothing at all.
Talk about your love for playing guitar and watching Kung Fu movies in addition to your love of playing the Dreamcast and coding in C#.
Join the Network
In addition to being where the game industry jobs are, you need to get yourself where the game industry people are. The game industry has stellar networking groups, including the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), LinkedIn professional groups, and social media-powered co-ops on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. Maybe you won’t secure a job with your nearest studio right this instant, but you might be able to grab a beer with its team before the weekend is done.
In addition to getting into game industry social media groups, Twitter is a particularly powerful tool for industry networking. Hashtags like #gameDev and #indieGameDev, will connect you with thousands of colleagues at all levels from solo to triple-A.
Consistent demand and ever-evolving technology means the game industry will never run out of opportunities for talented individuals determined to chase their dreams. The game industry can be a competitive, chaotic field, but plenty of professionals agree that working on the inside is a dream come true. If you think you have what it takes, consider the tips above and follow advice from industry pros wherever you can find it. Once you’ve created a plan of attack, let us know how you plan to wow the industry!
