Want a Career in Electronic Gaming? Ask a Top Leader in the Gaming Industry

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@UCLAri is a decade+ games industry veteran with experience in a variety of roles ranging from software project management to business development. In his career he has helped launch platforms and hardware, he is a credited contributor to nearly 20 games, and he has helped broker some of the coolest partnerships in gaming history. If you play any games, odds are that he’s helped launch at least one game you’ve played in the past decade.

@UCLAri currently work for one of the largest publishers in the world in a partnerships/operations role.

@UCLAri can help answer questions across the industry, but his main areas of expertise are on the publishing of games: mainly in partnerships, operations, and go-to-market activities. He knows enough about marketing to be dangerous and can tell future hopeful devs what to look for in terms of high-level pathing (platform vs games vs tech etc.)

We’re happy to have him here to help people decipher an admittedly very confusing and fast-paced industry. Make sure to ask your questions below!

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Hi All,

Very happy to be here! Happy to help!

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Thanks for hosting this AMA @UCLAri

What skills and experience does someone need to have to break into the gaming industry?

Some colleges offer a game design major. How useful is this major? Would you recommend a high schooler interested in electronic gaming to pursue such a major (vs something more traditional and broad based like CS or business)?

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For college students and prospective college students, what college course work would you suggest? My impression (from decades ago experience in a computer game company) was that the following could be useful for game developers:

  • General computer science + graphics + AI
  • Art
  • History and social studies (for background context of gaming stories)
  • Creative writing (for creating stories)
  • Physics (for games with objects moving around)
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What do you want to do here?

Gaming is a broad industry with a lot of different paths, but I generally break it up into three main pillars: publishing, development and platforms/technology.

From making games to developing hardware (Nvidia/AMD come to mind) to leading marketing campaigns there is a home for all sorts of folks in the industry. I often start with the question: what do you enjoy doing before we try to slot you into something. If you want to write code, that’s a different beast from wanting to run ops on a platform.

I tend to avoid giving specific majors/fields of study and instead focus on asking people what part of the games supply chain they most enjoy the idea of working on. And from there, I tend to give feedback on what I know of that work and how the day-to-day is.

Put another way, someone who wants to do what I do would be far better off with an eclectic mix of social science, law (contracts, lots of them), and business economics than trying to drill into knowing the differences between C++ and C#. My limited coding knowledge can help detect sandbagging from devs, but it isn’t going to do much when the issue is unsticking a stubborn exec who’s worried about impacts to their timelines.

Game Design Majors

That all being said, I tend to look a bit sideways at game design majors because I frankly don’t think that anyone really knows that makes a game “stick” in the market. Put another way: guys like Shigeru Miyamoto and Hideo Kojima have historically broken lots of “rules.” The auteur game design folks demonstrate to me that games are a moving target and what people need to make good games can be at times ineffable. You can observe stuff like Gears of War and say that Cliff B figured it out, but by the time he did so, the mechanics were already stale and basic.

My advice, generally speaking, is to be a ravenous consumer of art and media while honing repeatable skills. If you want to work in design, then become a talented coder. Seems simple enough, but the world is littered with folks who say they can do “x” and really cannot. To borrow from perhaps outdated parlance: GIT GUD (get good.) But there’s more to that than just knowing how C works. Learn how to THINK. Look at how games like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom managed to make a complex physics engine work on hardware from 2015. Learn how Rockstar makes open world games feel vibrant and alive with fun and engaging physics and social interaction. Learn how writers… write.

READ. Watch good movies. Play a variety of games (get out of your comfort zone!)

You ever watch interviews with successful musical artists and even the guys playing punk rock talk about how they listen to jazz and like… Bach? Be that. Do that.

Once you figure out what you want to do, then develop a range of skills that make doing it possible. Don’t worry so much about a specific major as much as you worry about developing a range of skills that make you able to do a variety of things.

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I think on the dev side you’re spot on. Like I said in the comment above: if you look at the best devs they’re all pretty multi-disciplinary and they’re ravenous learners/consumers of high-quality media.

In general, I tell technical majors to get out of the engineering halls and go take a sociology class, go learn some history, learn some creative writing. Not only will it make it easier to transition into senior roles, it’ll make you a better coder anyway.

I tell non-technical majors to learn SOME math and science. Go take statistics, take microeconomics, learn how to do Python/R.

But yes, even if you want to code, learn how to deal with humans! I can’t begin to tell you how many successful engineering leads I’ve met who are also wonderfully talented writers, artists, etc.

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How do you approach getting a job at a company? In particular, for graphics/design (portfolio?)?

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I tend to argue that gaming is a LOT of different groupings: AAAs (EA/T2/Square), AAs (Sega, Devolver, Obsidian), platforms (XB, Sony, Nintendo sorta), indies, and mega-entities (Tencent etc).

My experience is mainly in the platform/AAA space, but there’s a few commonalities:

Network, Network, Network

I know this is trite, but networking is huge in gaming. There’s a number of folks on social media who help people with this (Amir Satvat comes to mind), but merely knowing where the openings are is a big first step. I often reach out to people in my network when a role opens on my team or other teams, and it gives them a head start in the application process. I can tell you from experience that referrals help and get people hired. Be the person who gets referred, trust me. It’s a huge leg up!

Know what you want

But before we even get there, ask yourself what you want to do in design. Being candid, a lot of design jobs in 2024+ are now outsourced to companies like Virtuous, and they’re basically soulless “design a weapon” kinds of jobs. There ARE creative services jobs that let you do work on assets for titles, including launch assets for storefronts, but they’re not the fun, exciting jobs where you design the next helmet worn by Master Doom Link Vault Guy. They’re basically repurposing box art to fit on a mobile device kinds of jobs. It’s work, but it’s also often among the first to go in layoffs.

What do you want to do here?

This is really more of a question for you: what exactly do you want to do in design? Do you want to be the Metzger whose character designs make Warcraft what it is? Or do you want to design in-game assets and lead teams of designers?

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Interesting conversation with my s today, who said that once a game is launched, and before a new one is in the works, many of those who worked on the previous launch are let go. How often does that happen?

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This really depends on the developer/publisher.

I can say that at my AAA, it is generally not true that people simply get laid off after a title launches. If new pushes into a new franchise flop, sometimes yes, but I know folks who have been at developers/publishers for years and even decades.

This last 12 months or so has been pretty rough for the industry, and a lot of folks are extending the logic to assume that this last year is predictive of the future. I’m not so convinced. For one, I think the industry got too irrationally exuberant during COVID and has done a bit of resizing since people began going outside again. But also, I think a lot of it is just a lot of irresponsible choices coming to bear (Embracer being the poster child of this.)

To be clear, too: layoffs are more common for some teams than others. My experience has been that more operational/cross-functional folks are stickier than, say, core marketing. It’s a lot harder for companies to re-home a junior marketer if a franchise flops, versus someone like me who works across the org in its entirety.

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Partnerships is always about finding the balance between what your company’s leadership wants to achieve and what the other company’s leadership wants to achieve. The most important thing is to get REALLY GOOD at listening, synthesizing information nonstop, and finding the middle ground that gets that deal but doesn’t tick off a bunch of internal stakeholders. It’s a lot of soft skills that don’t tend to be easily taught.

Understanding the market for a new title is tough and being frank I don’t think anyone has it figured out. I don’t think Epic knew in their wildest dreams that Fortnite would be what it is. Lightning in a bottle like that is rare and often bewilders even the developer/publisher.

But if you strike out on your own as a startup/indie and try to figure out what works, my advice is to-- against all odds-- not listen to whatever chatter you see online. People are very good at saying what they want, but they’re really poor at actually knowing what they want. Make the game you want to make, make it fun, and make sure you have a good narrative to tell people when it hits Steam/PS/Switch/XB/EGS/GOG/etc. Don’t try to make the game that becomes Rocket League. Make the game that you think people will enjoy irrespective of what someone on a subreddit says that they would buy.

Nobody knew they wanted Dave the Diver until it came out.