Help With Getting into Video Game Industry

Hey, all.

This thread is for those of us with a plan or an idea for video games. Some of us might have already begun an internship at a video game company while others are currently enrolled in their first year of college dedicated to making their own creation tangible. Others still have yet to begin learning the skills needed to make one ourselves and are searching for our own way into this industry.

Please feel free to post information about how you got started in the video game industry or if that is not you then ask how to begin and someone will give you direction. Even if you do not plan on making a video game, just being a part of this industry is appreciated and discussing your story is welcome.

I've been accepted to a university that teaches game design and coding. I've chosen games design (story, characters development, art direction, gameplay etc.) and going to their open day was great. Over 75% get internships at Sony Cambridge and Sony Guerrilla Studios. Their tech is fairly new and their course is a total of 3 years: first being theory, second planning and third collaborating with the coding team to make a small game.

Also, that thing PC Elitists say when they don't get a game on consoles "The game is developed on a PC, therefor it's ready for PC" is so wrong and shows they haven't the faintest idea. Sure the games are developed on PCs but when it comes to coding a developer is probably used to the console architecture which is a whole lot different than the PCs. And it really annoys me when you try to point this out and they flat-out reject it saying "You have no idea" when they're not the ones making video games

Good thread topic.............I don't mind my story, yet it's long winded, a tad bitter, and gets in the way of paying bills.

In short, I'm at the other end of the spectrum, a long-time graduated citizen with a fantastic hobby and hefty loans. (...so I'm an Indie-dev.)

Even shorter, I should have gone for programing instead of 3D.

But that's just me. So much of the media industry is who you know, and who knows you...and that is a short-coming of mine.

Yet it's a fascinating industry, and I still enjoy making my own development-stage projects while I hold a completely unrelated, yet stable day-job. I aim to make a trilogy that can at least be finished as a graphic novel/storyboard... and have two games come out of it. One with a 90's adventure point&click feel, and the other in a RPG save-the-world setting. If anything, to pay homage and learn about my roots; yet also to spend my time crafting something that I feel is fresh...and I've done a lot of "research".

Aside from Unity, a good mulit-platform engine would be either GameMaker from YoYo Games----long withstanding and finally giving a legit vibe; or Garage-Game's Torque series of engines. Wintermute has a solid point&click system developed. There are literally dozens of engines available...I could go on about the hunt. It's hard to decide which platform to design for in 2014, and these two companies provide a lot of spread with reasonable investment.

The Oculus Rift has a lot of promise for a new market. The mobile craze is too cookie-cutter for a non programmer, and console games are out of my league (without a team). It's fun to think about what hasn't been done yet...because, well lets face it, a lot has already been done.

hehehe, I'm posting anyway, yet this is all off-topic, instead of getting into the industry, I've gotten over it.

I'll tell my story another time, but for now I wanted to share that GameSpot is actually hiring right now for a new member to join the Community / Social Media team.

Depends on which side of the industry you want to enter. Generally, though, it always comes down to skill, luck, and who you know. It's because of those three things that I'm currently writing for a couple of small sites and have attended E3 twice now (thanks in part to GameSpot). Trick is to stay focused and not give up. It's a tough industry to get into, but the payoff is so worth it.

I taught myself how to program games and 3D graphics while I was attending college to study electrical/computer engineering. I kept learning graphics and making games in my spare time after getting a non-games job, and after a little while I made friends with a graphics programmer at a game studio. He got me an interview, I got a job, and a few years later I'm a lead graphics programmer. Way better than my old job, for sure.

I'm usually a GameFAQs poster but I wanted to jump into this topic as I've got some experience others may find valuable.

I started playing on an Atari 2600 in the early 80's and I've owned every major system released in the U.S. since. I've been at this hobby for about 30 years now, and for all those years, all I wanted to do was review video games. I was a decent writer through high school and got into journalism in college, but all I wanted to do was tell people what I thought about games I played. Who doesn't, right? Well, here's how I did it.

First, I went to college and got my journalism degree. You might think it would be easy to just sit down and write, but you've got to have the education as a base. Otherwise, you are just another faceless Internet person with an opinion and a message board account (i.e. less than nothing). What I learned in school, working at (and eventually running as EIC) the college newspaper was absolutely instrumental in getting me into the industry. I'd go so far as to say that if you want to write about games and don't have a college degree, either get one or find a new dream job.

Next, you have to be willing to do stuff you don't necessarily want to do - and for no money at all. I first started writing about games as a FAQ/guide writer - for free. I'd pick a game I was playing and enjoying, and I'd sit down and write a full guide for it. This is not quick or easy work. Even small games are huge projects, and if you don't do the job right, you may as well not do it at all. My first guides were for Time Ace and Transformers: Autobots/Decepticons on the DS. Small time games, right? Each guide was about 80 pages and two weeks worth of work. Keep in mind no one hired me to write these - I just picked games I liked, wrote the guides and submitted them to GameFAQs.

As I continued to write guides, I began to get noticed. Other sites contacted me about using my guides on their sites, which was my "in." "Sure," I'd say through e-mail, "You can absolutely use my guide on your site. Say, are you hiring at all? No? How about freelance work?" This is how I got my contract with IGN. The contacted me about a guide I wrote, and through e-mail, they ended up hiring me as a freelancer to write some pretty important guides. I was contracted by IGN to write guides for Bioshock, Mass Effect, Eternal Sonata, Punch-Out!!!, Too Human, Fable 2, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and a few others, and those guides got thousands, if not millions, of views. Hell, I recently found out my Bioshock guide was translated into German and Spanish! Crazy! This was EXTREMELY time consuming - taking up to a month of daily work on a game and averaging guides in the multiple hundreds of pages - and all I got for it was name recognition and a free copy of whatever game I was writing about. I had to stop taking these assignments as life got more complex. A full time job and a wife don't leave you eight hours a day to play games and examine every minute detail, so I had to stop taking these freelance assignments, as cool as it was to tell people I wrote for IGN.

Around the time I began writing for IGN, a smaller site, The Gamer's Temple, contacted me about using one of my free guides. I gave them the old, "Sure! How about a job?" line, and they agreed to take me on for a game review or two. Finally! I was going to be reviewing games! This was for no pay whatsoever; all I got was a free game to play and a forum to let others know what I thought about it. I had done some minor reviewing for my college paper and another site that basically stole my work (screw you - you know who you are), but this seemed like the real deal. All that hard work for no pay had finally paid off!

That was almost eight years ago. Since then, I've written nearly 1,000 reviews for The Gamer's Temple and I can't ever see myself stopping. Sure, I have a wife, baby and a full time job, but my reviewing gig has some amazing perks. I still don't get paid, but I get all my games for free and often weeks or months before the rest of the world can buy them in stores. I've been invited to some amazing press events - the Prototype 2 party in Las Vegas and visiting Vicarious Visions to see Skylanders: SWAP Force months before release were highlights - and I get to have a platform to tell everyone what I think about the latest games. Metacritic has been a wonderful thing for me as my reviews get the same weight as the bigger sites and more and more people see them every year. And telling Gamestop employees, "No, I don't need to preorder (upcoming game). I've already got it," will never, ever get old.

Do I have the highest profile job in the industry? No. Am I under any delusions that my tiny voice somehow makes a difference? Definitely not. I have a fun side job that allows me to combine two things I love - gaming and writing - and it comes with some major bonuses I would never give up. Sure, I'd love a job offer from a major site that would allow me to work in the game/writing industry as my main occupation, but if it never happens, fine. I'm plenty happy with life as it stands now. I hope my story helps someone out there looking to get into this industry, and if you want to contact me my email is vinzclortho37@hotmail.com. Thanks for reading!

TL;DR: Want to review games? Get a degree, be willing to take crappy jobs for free and keep at it. If you are any good, something may come of it.

I'd be hesitant about getting into the gaming industry.

Generally, the pay is low compared to how many hours you put in, there is no work/life balance whatsoever, there is no job stability (it's not unusual for wholesale layoffs to occur right after a game is finished), benefits are low to nonexistent, and recently, you literally have to worry about your personal safety and the safety of your family if some gamers on the internet decide to threaten you or find out where you live (which they can easily do) because you nerfed their favorite gun in Call of Duty.

If I had excellent programming/writing/graphics/audio skills, I wouldn't even consider gaming and would instead look into other more lucrative and stable fields that would utilize and reward my skills better.

Who are you talking to? Also jimmy_russell, what do you do in the industry?

My advice about getting into video games is if you are under 18 years old explore other options and see if you like anything better way to many kids have unrealistic expectations of getting into the industry

If you still plan to proceed after 18 prepare for extremely difficult field to get into. Very hard to find a job not a lot of people want to let you get your foot in the door. People get frequently fired when things go wrong in a game. Expect very low pay and having to hope to get really lucky.

The best and the luckiest sometimes do end up with the dream job they want, work at a caring company, and make good pay but, they are definitely very far and few in between.

Unless your well established in the field i wouldn't recommend it to people that have a family to take care off especially.

I know people in the industry and it's very far from a glamorous job for most.

I think I would've loved to work in the gaming industry in some fashion. Part of me wants to become a music-designer but I'm afraid I'm getting to old to get a foothold, and I'm a dad so things aren't just about me anymore. I do have the pleasure of having me and my bands music all over the secret world though, I guess one could call that something. Gave me a free game and a lifetime subscription at least lol, now it's gone F2P..... still a free game lol :)

This article from Cracked.com illustrates all of the recurrent issues with making video games and the industry that appeared from the field: http://www.cracked.com/article_20727_5-reasons-video-game-industry-about-to-crash.html. Consider all this before committing yourself to making games.

If you want to be a game journalist, that's probably even harder. Like nimerjm37 said, get a degree. A lot of people think that a degree doesn't matter if you work hard enough, but 98.6% of writing/editing positions ask for a Bachelor's degree. I know it's expensive and it's a full four years of work, but a college degree is one big step that makes a difference.

Next, you need to write. More importantly, you need to write without getting paid for it. Volunteer work is everywhere (like here), and while you might not be able to pay the bills with what you reap from it, you will get something even more important: experience. How much you made at your last job isn't likely to be more important than how long you worked at your last job. Also, the landscape of jobs changes after you leave college. Degrees mean less and less the longer you wait to find a job after college; once you're two or three years out of school, the jobs aren't likely to look at your degree. Instead, they'll look at your experience. I really can't stress enough how important experience is to the journalism industry. A degree is telling; experience is showing. (Still, a degree is important. It's that one little edge you can get. It may lose meaning later on, but you should still get one. Trust me.)

If you plan on getting a paid job in game journalism, that takes a LOT of work and there's no guarantee it'll happen at all. Luck is involved in this equation, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least try to get involved yourself. Early on, you'll need another job to actually make money and support yourself, but that doesn't mean you should slack on your writing. You're going to be writing lots of things, many of which aren't in the gaming field or even the journalism field, but like every job, you'll need to do things that you hate before you can do things that you love. I am a staff member for Hardcore Gamer Magazine, but I also volunteer with a local music publication. Keeping yourself busy helps. Once again, it's experience. Experience matters.

Writing about games isn't likely to move into full-time work, but it's not impossible. It takes an unprecedented amount of luck and even more hard work. I repeat: it's verydifficult. But if you are sure you can handle it (be 110% sure), you will have rewards further down the line. It's a dynamic industry and there's always something to talk about.

There are obviously all sorts of problems in the games industry, but your take on it strikes me as a little exaggerated and sensationalized. Games developers need talented, qualified employees like any other company and they have to pay them appropriately. Personally I'm paid very well, and our company has great benefits. Long hours are common, but in a lot of cases it's a choice made by an individual who feels they want to put in as much time as they can. I have plenty of people at my company who work 40 hour weeks while still producing great output. And I'm sure that I don't have to explain that the games industry is not full of people who actually fear for the safety of their families. For 99.999% of people the worst you have to deal with is reading someone go a little overboard in trashing your hard work.

The one part of the games industry I've encountered that is actually terrible would be QA. Those guys aren't filling positions that require skilled employees, and their pay and work conditions reflect that. There's always more 20-year-olds who "want to play games for a living" ready to fill an open position for 10 bucks an hour.

Depends on what you want to do in the game industry, but if you want to directly work on a game school is good, but not good enough. You need to have experience, and need to have a few projects under your belt to show your abilities. This could be a artist showing off his art, a programmer showing off his app, game, etc. You could of course try to make a game company yourself, and get a business loan, but you need to make sure you know what you are doing or else you will just end up digging a hole that you may never get out of.

This.

Not only you have to be a programmer or artist, you need to be an exceptional artist and programmer as most studios look for a "senior" programmer, artist, animator..etc. You could also be neither and become a producer, the one who brings all talents together and offers the resources to make a video game.

@AK_the_Twilight@nimerjm37: On writing for free: I'd recommend you be careful about it. Writing for free helps, to an extent, but you don't want to be taken advantage of, either. For instance: if a site offers paid positions but forces new hires to work for free for an indeterminate amount of time, think very carefully before taking a job there. Could end up turning into something good (it's gotten me into E3 and a bunch of review codes), but it's just as likely to end up profiting off free labor. Depends on the publication.

Best thing is to know when it's time to move up. Don't sit around waiting for a paid position to fall in your lap. Be proactive and start pitching articles to bigger publications, particularly those with clearly outlined freelance opportunities. Those will be your ticket to making it in this line of work full-time, as a piece on, say, Polygon, carries way more weight on a resume than a review on some unknown small-time blog.