Breaking OUT of the Video Game Industry

With the layoff hits continuing, explore how to embrace the skills you’ve acquired in video game development (or whatever your current industry may be) and bring them to different industries.

This article is written with a focus on the video game industry, but many of the lessons can be applied to career switches between other industries as well.

In response to my post last week regarding one of my most frequently asked questions (how to break IN to video gaming despite current conditions) a LinkedIn commenter suggested I talk about the opposite challenge: breaking OUT of the games industry.

There have been 23,000 layoffs in the past 2 years in video gaming; I know firsthand because I was one of them. It’s dire out there — I have multiple incredibly talented friends who have been laid off twice this year alone. That just shows how unpredictable conditions are at many studios: actively hiring only to downsize or shut down weeks later. It’s not about skill. Many folks are struggling through no fault of their own finding a new role, but the combination of the imposter syndrome caused by layoffs and the rejection by gaming roles seems to conspire to convince folks that their skills are only valuable in the game industry.

But the truth is that video games are large, complex software projects. In most cases, you have at least a subset of skills that’s applicable to the tech industry as a whole. And your specialized experience in games in some cases can be pitched as a bonus — there are plenty of industries curious about designing for behavioral change (aka the dreaded gamification), immersion, or engagement in general. The problem is that you need to change the way you tell your story and focus on specific roles to maximize your chances of success.

Breaking out is a topic I’m familiar with, as in 2007 I left the video game industry after roughly 5 years and landed in… server software. At the time, my gaming friends were absolutely baffled. But I had good reasons, and my move was challenging, successful, and brought with it far greater financial security. And I’ve actually switched between industries several times — including my move BACK to video gaming from… global philanthropy.

If continuing your saved game in the gaming industry feels too difficult right now, let me give you some tools to power up your attempt to break out of the video game industry. Sometimes, starting a new game with the skills you learned from another playthrough results in better outcomes. And if the thought of leaving hurts, it’s OK to grieve.

Careers are not a straight line, and you may be able to return with a set of new skills. I returned to gaming after 13 years and went from Lead Producer to Director of User Experience and now Creative Director, at some of the world’s most accomplished game studios. As it turns out, the same techniques that will help you leap OUT of your current industry will help you make the leap back in, should you decide to boomerang later. In this article, I’ll walk through both sides from my own lived experience, and provide a framework of 5 components to any job offer that you can apply immediately to break down your background against new job opportunities.

In order to maximize your chances of success at landing a new job in conditions where you’re a higher risk candidate due to lack of industry experience, you’ll want to consider:

• Evaluating your skills
• Tuning your storytelling
• Controlling for uncertainty
• Taking small steps forward

Careers in video gaming are difficult, and aren’t always a straight line. Sometimes you need to start a new career game with the skills you picked up along the way. Image Credit: Adobe Stock (non-AI).

Glossary

You’ll want to learn a few terms that come up frequently in tech job searches before moving forward. Some of these definitions are sourced from Gartner.

• ENTERPRISE: Typically, this term is used in business to refer to companies with 1,000 employees or more. It can also be used to refer to companies that make over $1 billion in annual revenue.
• MEDIUM-SIZED BUSINESS: Businesses with 100–999 employees, or businesses that make between $50 million and $1 billion in annual revenue.
• SMALL BUSINESS: 99 employees or less, or under $50 million in annual revenue.
• B2B / Business to business: companies selling products that other companies use. Accounting software, payroll software, things like that.
• B2C / Business to consumer: companies selling products directly to individuals on the open market. Technically, video gaming is a B2C market.
• INDUSTRY: When used in the context of this article or a job search in tech, it is usually the primary domain or subject of the software. Common industries include things like healthcare, finance, automotive, travel, social media, entertainment, sports, education, computer hardware, retail/e-commerce, and beyond. If you’re coming from the video game industry, you’ve been in the “video gaming industry”, which is often considered a subset of the “entertainment industry”.

Evaluate your skills

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the anxiety around thoughts like “I worked in this very specific industry and the experience is wasted.” But so much of what we do is applicable. Take a deep breath and pick one project at a time to start with. Ask yourself some questions:

• What tools did you use, like Airtable, Workday, or Unity? Are those tools ever used in other industries?
• What processes did you use, like Agile? How might I use that knowledge at a new company?
• How did you collaborate and influence other people? Could the lessons from those experiences be applied outside your current industry?
• What specific skills did you use from your craft? Are they unique to the industry you’re in, or would you be applying those same skills in other industries as well?

Take an inventory of the skills and tools you know, and also take a look at several of the job descriptions you’re drawn to. Are there certain types of jobs where your skills are most aligned? Are there skills you have that are needed but not explicitly called out in your resume, and that employers might not know about since they don’t know your current industry?

Every job we do is filled with a wide variety of tasks, and only a few of them are truly disposable when we leave. It’s up to us to tell the story about what skills we’ve acquired and what we’ve learned from them moving forward.

Tune your storytelling

Often, an industry gap is a storytelling problem. Yes, your potential hiring manager may look at you as a risk because you can’t cite experience in their industry. But if you can clearly identify the skills you used in OTHER industries, the impact they had in context, and how they might impact your target role, you’re helping to bring that hiring manager along and paint a picture for them.

How might your pool of skills and tools map to that job description, and how might you connect those dots for a hiring manager using your resume, cover letter, or portfolio? Don’t make a hiring manager do that connection work — for those of us switching lanes, it’s incumbent on us to connect the dots. We’re competing against dozens if not hundreds of candidates who might be a more direct match on paper, and become the path of least resistance. It’s not impossible for a hiring manager to take a leap on you, but you’ve got to make it as natural as possible.

Examples:

• You’re an engineer who specialized in database programming and authentication systems for a gaming platform. You go to interview with a social media company, and they also work with large scale databases and a variety of login methods. You tell the story about how your work launching a new authentication method resulted in better user acquisition and security across the board.
• You’re a producer or program manager and Scrum leader for your live service game pod. You apply for a job in finance where they’re seeking someone comfortable facilitating Agile development in high stakes environments, and highlight the story of how your work helped keep the team on track in a 24/7 environment to successfully ship 3 patches in 3 months without burnout.
• You’re a narrative designer who worked on a variety of character designs. You apply for a copywriting role at a marketing agency, and you tell a story about how you immersed yourself in context to develop the tone and copy for a new character to differentiate it from the dozens of other characters, and the resulting impact on sales and engagement.
• You’re a game designer who worked at an indie game company on a somewhat successful but beloved Steam game. You tell the story about how your role included UX and UI design, and how you iterated the design of your inventory system based on player feedback to improve player sentiment and engagement with the game.
• You’re a user experience designer who worked on internal developer tools and platforms for a big game publisher. You apply to work on server software and IT admin experiences, and you tell the story about how you worked on high complexity internal tools that helped people manage high-risk data while minimizing errors.
• You’re a product manager who worked at an eSports company producing live events and limited time online experiences. You apply to work at other entertainment industry companies, and emphasize your ability to work cross-media and on events with high production value and technical complexity.

The secret is just a slight flip of how you’re presenting the work you’ve already done. You’re not leading with “I worked on Super Mario Brothers.” You’re leading with “I had a challenge that is similar to challenges your business faces, and here’s how I approached it.”

Control for Uncertainty

We’ve all been exposed to the trope of “being discovered” and often dream of someone taking a chance on us. But not all chances are created equal. Hiring managers are trying to minimize risk when selecting a new employee, and they are doing so in a crowded market with many competitors who may be mostly or fully qualified. Flinging your resume and cover letter into a pile without tweaking them to help the prospective manager understand which parts of the job description you can cover without risk will often lead to failure.

Most of my major promotions have come when switching companies or shortly thereafter, which may seem counterintuitive. But a specific mental framework has helped me zero in on the right opportunities when I’m looking to stretch my wings into a new role. I think of a job description in technology as looking for fit in terms of these 5 broad dimensions of a job opening:

• SKILL: “I know what to do.” This is the most critical category — most managers aren’t willing to teach core skills, as they have a job of their own to do. This is where you’ll need to deploy storytelling to reframe the use of your skills in games as relevant for gaming.
• EXPERIENCE: “I’ve already done this job at this level.” Knowing how to do a thing is different than doing and learning from a thing.
• SCALE: “I’ve worked in the same size organization or on the same size of product.” This is the most difficult piece to come by, as you can’t just magically start operating in an enterprise environment and immediately know how it differs from a small business/startup. I’ve been rejected from companies because I was too “enterprise” even though I’ve also worked at smaller companies. But this can also be a strength. If you know what scale you’re specialized in, you can target your applications, cover letters, and resumes to promote that experience.
• INDUSTRY: “I’ve worked in this context before and understand the challenges I’ll face.” This is a learning and context challenge. If you haven’t worked in an industry, you can bridge the gap with research and curiosity.
• TECHNOLOGY: “I’ve worked with this platform or a related platform before.” This is another learning and context challenge. If you’re missing tech experience you need, you can seek it out on your own via volunteer projects or training.

For managers, you’ll likely need to add coaching & collaboration here based on the role’s needs.

Of course, a hiring manager would love to see an exact fit. But if you fit MOST of these categories for a role, that makes it easier for a manager to make a conscious decision to let you grow into the other category because they can see and manage that specific risk factor.

Case Study 1: My video game breakout

When I broke out of gaming the first time, I went from working as a Lead Producer on Disney games to a UX Designer role on server software. UX Designers have to do a portfolio review, so it was a steep hill to climb. I knew I was missing a direct match on Industry, and that my recent work would make any employer question whether I had a match on Skills. I made some conscious choices that, in retrospect, helped my hiring managers control for risk on the Skill, Scale, Experience, and Technology vectors. In all cases, I provided extra context because I knew my audience wouldn’t be familiar with the norms of the video game industry.

• SKILL : I demonstrated specific skills by presenting micro-case studies pulled from gaming that applied directly to my new job, rather than presenting my games as a monolith. (IE, information architecture, user studies, requirements, etc.)
• SCALE: I emphasized my experience at another enterprise-sized company as a way to demonstrate that I was capable of navigating complex environments. Microsoft, my eventual employer, was hyper-massive, but Electronic Arts, a former employer, had over 5,000 employees. My work as a localization producer coordinating the translation and testing of The Sims Bustin’ Out on Game Boy and my experience as an assistant producer on a launch title for the Nintendo DS coordinating all final publisher and platform reviews were clear demonstrations of my ability to navigate bureacracy and adapt to urgent business needs.
• EXPERIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: I highlighted work I’d done on similar platforms. In this case, moving to server meant working on PC software, so I emphasized any experience I’d had working on PC form factors (mostly web). I also drew in any college projects that were more general and not gaming related (save your work, folks!) I used my portfolio review to demonstrate that I’d successfully worked through traditional design process before at a similar level of granularity in different contexts.

Case Study 2: My return to games

I also deployed this thought framework when approaching my return to games. My ultimate goal was actually to move into senior leadership, so I was interviewing at companies in multiple industries, but even though I’d never been a Director+ before, the response was much stronger in video games because my past controlled for all elements but the experience.

• SKILL: By this time, I’d been working for multiple years as a Principal UX Designer and had many case studies I could draw from — I ensured that I pulled different examples based on the industry I was interviewing for (B2B, B2C) and focused on the parts of my skillset that were called out by the job description (like information architecture or prototyping), always connecting to real-world results when possible.
• SCALE: At this point, I had worked with companies from 200 employees through 200,000+ — and smaller if you count my employment and volunteering experience in the arts. Depending on the size of the company I was interviewing with, I would choose examples from my past that showed I was able to work within a similar context. Small companies, for example, worry that an enterprise-minded person may come in and institute extra bureaucracy for no reason, or may resist working on a wide variety of tasks when needed.
• TECHNOLOGY: I’d shipped experiences on gaming consoles, PCs, and a variety of consumer hardware devices. Comfort with the cloud (hello, live service game veterans), constrained hardware experiences, consumer products, and large scale deployments all helped me make my case to different employers.
• INDUSTRY: As a returning game industry vet, game companies got my unique and varied background in shipping many games quickly. I didn’t have mobile or live service experience yet, but I was able to speak to production process and timelines, cross-discipline collab, and the like.

By telling a strong story in these categories, it made it easier for hiring managers to take a leap on me as a Director. They knew I wouldn’t be wasting time learning the other pieces.

Taking small steps forward

If you feel that you have a larger gap, or are encountering difficulty, broaden your exploration to include alternate modes of employment.

There are a large number of vendor agencies like Aquent or Robert Half who maintain a roster of talent that they make available to companies on a temporary basis. The use of a vendor role as a career stepping stone is very common indeed. The most important value a vendor role provides is the experience.

Why are vendor roles worth pursuing? Vendor roles often carry a MUCH lower interview burden. This may mean 30–90 minutes instead of 4–16 hours. (There is typically some time burned setting up with the agency up front). It’s lower risk for someone to take a chance on a candidate with a partial match of experience or skills. And you, in exchange for a little less security, get a very quick addition to your resume and immediate chance to onboard and learn a new company, which is ALWAYS beneficial for growth and networking, even if you don’t ever convert to full time. (Note that you typically need to say you worked FOR the vendor company when posting on LinkedIn, but you can mention you worked WITH your partner company like Microsoft or Riot Games.)

When I “broke out” of games, I DID NOT get in through the Microsoft front door or even a friend as a referral. What I did was list myself with a vendor placement company like Aquent, who facilitate placing people on short-term contracts with big businesses, and sometimes provide a few of the benefits you’d get as a long term employee by proxy. My listing there got me some interviews I never got as a game developer applying cold. One of these was a 30 minute interview with the Server and Management Studios team at Microsoft. Before the end of the discussion, they asked “Are you interested in a full time job?” We ended up converting to a full time loop.

Always treat the role as a job interview, as you never know whether a full time opportunity will present itself. I myself have employed a number of folks as vendors who went on to convert to full time at Microsoft, the Gates Foundation, and Riot Games. You can’t go in expecting conversion; but if you phone it in you can bet that opportunity won’t come your way, as it’s almost always a manager fighting for that headcount.

If a vendor role isn’t panning out, consider working with community organizations, local schools, or non profit organizations. They don’t always know what someone can provide from a technical perspective; it never hurts to offer services at a low or pro bono rate if you are looking to build your portfolio. But be careful not to cause harm when going in — be committed and follow through, as they are people with careers too, not just ways to advance your own career.

Takeaway

Once you’ve reflected on your skills and what’s in the marketplace, you’ll see (perhaps even more than before) that each job fits into a unique place in the world; a combination of skills and scale and desired experience and technology required. You’ll begin to identify these patterns more readily, and you’ll learn what parts of your experience speak to specific patterns. The more you interview, the more you’ll get to practice telling your story in this way.

Ask yourself:

• Do you have any prior industry experience to fall back on? If so, how might that reduce the risk for hiring managers in a way that gives you greater flexibility applying in other dimensions, like scale or experience?
• If you don’t have another industry to fall back on, how does your background play out across the 5 dimensions of a job opening described in this article (skill, experience, scale, technology, and industry)? What might that tell you about strategic job opportunities to focus on in order to control uncertainty for hiring managers, like companies of a similar size or that use similar technology?
• Are there alternate modes of employment that might help you bridge the gap on your experience and industry history?

Everyone who works on video games understands that players are our audience. Hiring managers are the audience for your work as a job seeker. They are also humans, with cognitive biases, needs, and typically a lot of cognitive overload in a world where hundreds of applications can come in overnight. The more you can do to tell your story in a way that resonates with your potential future manager, the more likely you are to rise above the noise. But the first step is acknowledging and accepting: your skills have value. You have value. You are more than the games you’ve shipped. Become the author of your own career story. GLHF (good luck have fun).

If you found value in this free article, consider checking out my book Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences. It’s a holistic look at creating next-generation interactive experiences across devices, and it’s a good bridge for folks in games looking to see how their skills might apply in a different context. Reviews are most welcome and help support my future writing work.

Cheryl Platz is a game designer, director, instructor, author, and streamer. She is an adjunct instructor of video games at Carnegie Mellon University’s Masters of Entertainment Industry Management (Hollywood Campus). Her second book, a holistic look at game development and design entitled “Enduring Play: Creating Video Games that Thrive” will be published in 2025 by Rosenfeld Media. You can follow along on her writing process by following Cheryl on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitch, or TikTok.