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What Game Companies Want From Graduates
simoniker writes "Game education site Game Career Guide has a new feature talking to recruiters from notable game companies like EA, Insomniac Games, and THQ. They discuss the best university courses and qualifications for getting hired to be a game developer. EA's Colleen McCreary comments on the rise of some TV-advertised mass market game schools: 'Our concern with for-profit institutions is that students may not learn the fundamental tools for understanding and solving complex issues... We are most likely to hire someone who has a BFA or MFA from a traditional art college and a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science for our entry level artist and software engineer positions.'"
I work for a large game development studio. The slave labor approach only works for low innovation products. There are definitely studios that make those sorts of games, but even with aggressive overtime an inexperienced workforce will never return a superior value:cost ratio to warrant such an approach. We just finished managing a team of over a 100 people. We were trying to innovate, but such a large team made us too slow. Every new junior person we added after about 80 people probably lowered the overall quality of the product due to the increased communication overhead. Management in many development studios know this and are trying to make their teams more effective.
As it relates to "what developers want": We want smart people who like video games. We'll pay them well and send them home at 6pm. Slave labor studios will continue to exist, but innovative studios are on the rise and hiring aggressively. Ubisoft and Vivendi are two that come to mind.
If you didn't go to school, but you are energetic, disciplined and passionate, apply for QA roles and then commit to understanding the mechanics you see when you are testing. I know an Executive Producer of an extremely successful 2006 game that started in QA and absorbed the processes he saw around himself. He moved into design years later and applied this knowledge while absorbing process from new disciplines around him. Then he was a respected Producer for years, mainly because he understood what it took to get things done in each area. Most recently he applies all of this with a talented team and makes a great game.
Even young punks who think they know it all can grow up in QA. It is quite an eye-opener for these know-it-alls to be around disciplined, confident CompSci graduates who really do know their stuff. They often mature during this process can move onto more responsibility. The ones that don't are easy to spot.
If you have the education, the only thing that you need if you are missing experience in the games industry is modesty and passion. Modesty to work on the boring systems, and passion to make those seem exciting. The industry really needs more candidates. We routinely hire talent from other countries because we don't get enough local resumes.