No Way In for the Next Generation

I was inspired by the article Amir Satvat published this week on GamesBeat. Amir’s tracking puts roughly 300 to 350 open games roles in all of North America for people with zero to one years of experience.

He estimates placement odds for North American candidates who want a North American job at close to 2%. His article posits that we cannot keep asking people to prepare for an industry that has no place for them.

I teach the business of games to master’s students at USC, and he is right.

My students are not aspiring developers.

They are headed for marketing, publishing, production, finance, and analytics, and they carry a second disadvantage on top of having no experience, which is that they have nothing to show.

• An artist has an ArtStation page.
• An engineer has code that a senior engineer can read and judge in ten minutes.

A 24-year-old who wants to bring games to market has a CV with nothing on it a hiring manager can evaluate, so the interview becomes a conversation about potential, and potential loses to the candidate with two and a half more years every time.

The way I have tried to help is by giving my students a portfolio piece. We spend the semester taking a go-to-market plan apart section by section, using the tools and tactics I used over 25 years on Halo, Hearthstone, and Guild Wars 2, and every student leaves with a complete plan for a real game.

In three years of teaching, more than a dozen students have come back after landing roles at studios including Scopely, Tencent, and Riot Games and told me the plan was what put them over the top, because it was the one piece of evidence that proved they understood how a game finds its players. Any program can build this with a semester and an instructor who has done the work.

A portfolio piece does not fix a door that does not exist, though, and that is where I failed.

About a year ago I offered Amir help expanding his free toolset with a resource on games industry internships.

I could not build it.

Internships at game companies have become so scarce, so fragmented, and so hidden behind undocumented processes that there was nothing worth publishing, and I still feel guilty about telling him so. An industry that cannot describe how a student gets in the door has stopped expecting students to get in.

So the ask goes two ways.

• To programs like mine: give every business-track student a portfolio piece that proves they understand how a game reaches market.
• To studios and publishers: protect genuine beginner roles, and make your internship process findable by someone who does not already know you.

Without new talent entering our industry, our ability to innovate and stay relevant to players suffocates itself.