As a growing market filled with projects of increasing complexity, the video games industry requires a lot of bodies to keep the lights on.
The sector has exploded, with titles often requiring larger and larger teams to get them over the finish line. This demand often outstrips the supply of readily available workers who have trained specifically, meaning that in some parts of the world, game companies have to look outside to adjacent sectors for talent.
"There's a skills shortage in the UK," says Csaba Berenyi, the MD of developer Sponge Hammer – a studio that has hired most of its staff from outside of games.
"At any point, you can find hundreds of job openings; however, a large portion of those are for senior level or above. The pipeline for growing people into those roles takes a while to produce results, and one avenue is to attract talent from outside."
Amiqus' head of recruitment teams Stig Strand agrees, adding: "[Games are looking to hire outside the industry] always due to technical skills shortages. Games is still a volume-led sector for opportunity but still short on candidates in most cases mainly in tech areas."
It's worth noting that this isn't universally true across the board. Kim Adcock, the boss of recruitment firm One Player Mission, says that her clients are unwilling to hire from outside of games; partly this is studios having the ability to be picky when it comes to hiring.
"Another factor could be that the industry is older than it used to be, and therefore there are more people with more experience staying in the industry longer; enhancing the already established talent pool," she says.
"More specifically to us and the feedback we get from our own clients, is our fee. Our clients are paying a premium for us to find high-quality candidates for senior roles, so they want to see experienced candidates when using our service."
For those companies that are looking outside of games for hiring, there are a wide variety of skills that are transferable from an adjacent industry to games. For example, there's a lot of technical know-how that can be useful.
"A portion of our business is to provide specialist knowledge for developing software that runs in the cloud," Berenyi explains.
"Internet companies that run services scaling for millions of users solve issues some games are learning to tackle. The expertise engineers accumulate while working on such systems is directly transferable to games. UI art is another area where skills could be easily transferrable is UI art. There are exceptionally talented web designers who could be making your game look cool; instead, they work on the next webshop."
There is also demand – or at least appetite for – people with more artistic and creative skillsets.
"Splash Damage has regularly looked outside the industry for talent with transferrable skills, and we've picked up some amazing talent along the way," the company's VP of people, Steve Hessel, says. "A good example is UX and UI – for a long time, PC and console games were behind the curve compared to other industries. So that's allowed us to catch up a little there."
He continues: "UX design for games isn't that different from UX design for other interactive media; there's a lot of crossover with the movie industry when it comes to roles like visual effects or 3D modelling."
Video games is very different to a lot of other industries; it requires much longer lead times and projects take more time to complete. That's on top of the specialist knowledge that is required.
"It presents an interesting challenge," Berenyi says. "Games come with a ton of domain-specific knowledge that becomes increasingly more important the closer you work to the game. Speaking the common language with other devs and immediately understanding game systems and requirements by just hearing the name is an expectation game companies have, and people wanting to join in should be willing to learn."
It doesn't always have to be a challenge to move from outside games into the industry. Tabby Davies now works at Zynga's NaturalMotion as a senior software engineer but before moving into games, she worked at a payroll and HR company in the same sort of role. She says that while there was a lot to learn, the transition was not as difficult as she imagined.
"I had a preconception – and a lot of imposter syndrome – that I would never understand anything and had been hired in error as I was coming from the payroll world," she explains. "But I quickly realised that the gaming industry is so vast, there is always more to learn even if you have been in the games industry for your entire career. Each platform is different, each engine is different, each game is different, each tech stack is different, each team is different.
"A good example is coding languages. When I started, I inherited a lot of Ruby code, a programming language I had never used before. Because I had previous code experience and had built up good coding foundations and fundamentals I was able to start making an impact on the Ruby codebase immediately. I was really lucky to join a fantastic team, with whom I quickly became friends. They are also the people who had initially trained me and with whom I work with daily, so this helped a lot."
One of the biggest challenges faced by people moving into games from other industries is simply getting to grips with a very different way of working on and releasing products.
"I'd say it's largely adapting to how game development differs from other industries," Hessel says. "For example, the types of multiplayer games we make aren't small projects that can be built in six months. It often takes many years which can be a big change for somebody coming in from other industries."
Davies adds: "I work with studios and teams globally, so getting used to working across time zones and planning for this is very different to working for a company solely based in Europe.
"The games industry is 24/7, whereas in payroll, we had a few days a month that were our key dates when we were most busy, so we could plan for this. In gaming, players play all day at all times – holidays and weekends. A lot of my work has focused on supporting this 24/7 aspect like allowing our game devs to upload game builds via automation if they need a Sunday night hotfix!
"Finally, the people are so passionate, talented, and friendly – it is definitely an industry people stay in throughout their career, which is a fantastic way to grow your knowledge base."
Other companies have seen a lack of willingness from people outside of games to even consider that they could work in the industry.
"We have seen people not applying to games jobs, even though they were qualified because they thought they were not good enough," Berenyi says. "For many, making games is like magic: different disciplines working together and creating something that will look, feel and play fantastic. People not familiar with the processes tend to think if they are not programmers, they cannot contribute, which is far from the truth."
There's also the issue of game companies not believing that people outside of the industry have a place in their ranks.
"The key challenge is employer's seeing the value in non-games experience, this is especially true of technical/programming roles," says Alan Dixon, principal consultant at recruiter Amiqus. "That's less of a concern when filling operational roles in departments like finance, IT or HR, but games industry experience is still seen as more positive."
Working in games is an exciting prospect for a lot of people, but one area where the industry can fall behind compared to other sectors is compensation. Certainly, in more technical roles, compensation generally is lower in games than in comparable industries.
"Typically developers are paid more in other industries – and most other industries have bonafide graduate or entry schemes into companies and therefore the industry – which often pay very well compared to entry-level roles in games," Dixon explains. "Additionally, any career changers are on good salaries in their industry and when looking to move to games, find their 'market value' to be much lower. This is true for roles with real transferable skills such as project managers moving to games production and QA."
Berenyi adds: "This is a tricky subject. Compared to certain other industries, games is lower paid. Saying that, game companies can offer better job satisfaction. We try to look after people, which may sound hollow in light of the past year's layoffs. Also, seeing people enjoy the game you worked on is a special feeling."
As part of its overall working culture, Splash Damage's Hessel says that the studio regularly checks its staff pay not only against other games companies but similar firms in adjacent industries. This is one way that the developer has attempted to make itself more attractive to prospective employees, no matter where they work.
"Here at the studio, we benchmark our salaries regularly against our direct competitors but also other industries we're competing for talent with," he says.
"We want to make sure we're able to compete at the right level so our teams have access to the talent they need to build great games."
Though the UK games industry has often turned to adjacent sectors to secure a steady stream of talent, this might not continue indefinitely. The wave of layoffs at developers and publishers right now means that there is now an abundance of workers within the games industry looking for employment.
"I am expecting this to decrease given the recent wave of layoffs throughout the games industry as there's now more talent with hands-on experience available to be hired," Hessel says. "I would have answered this differently a few months ago when our industry was generally short of talent and looking more to adjacent industries."
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