All the game studios I've looked at have a requirement of 3 years professional experience. What exactly does that mean? How can you get into the industry if all the jobs require you to have already worked in the industry?

Send them CVs any way. Make sure you have a good demo. Games companies often don't advertise junior roles -- they have a queue of people already waiting to join them.

Go to job fairs, talk to people there.

Find the developers, talk to them in the pub.

Get recommended by friend who already works there.

Join to do something other than development -- retaining good testers is a nightmare and most companies are always looking for more.

These days, knowing someone on the inside is pretty much the best way to get a job anywhere. I doubt you can manage that though, else you'd have probably already tried it.

Otherwise I agree with Katie. You could apply anyway if you think your skill set is good enough (and especially if you have previous work or demos you can show them, bonus points if it's relevant to the sort of games they produce). I think most reasonable Human Resources people would look past such an arbitrary limit as 3 years of experience if you can demonstrate that you're the one for the job. That would hopefully at least get you to the interview stage where you can show them that you are qualified.

If you aren't qualified (i.e. fresh out of college and no portfolio yet), then you might be able to intern somewhere. You could submit applications to a few studios seeking an internship and you might get lucky. It might even be paid. If you're an intern there, you can much more easily move up into a regular development position, particularly after you've been there a while and picked up some needed experience.

All the game studios I've looked at have a requirement of 3 years professional experience. What exactly does that mean? How can you get into the industry if all the jobs require you to have already worked in the industry?

Please go read the Breaking In forum FAQs. Several of them address your question in different ways.

Put simply, studios don't need to do much hunting for entry level positions.

Studios get unsolicited applications all the time. When they actually do need someone, they post internally that they need some good programmers or artists or whatever, and the current workers can give a long list of friends and friends-of-friends that they can vouch for as being competent workers.


Generally when they ask for someone with 3 years of professional experience, that's what they want. They aren't looking for an entry level worker. You can submit your name, but don't be surprised when you either never hear back or hear a rejection.

Ideally they want someone who has shipped one or two or three titles already. Someone who understands what it means to final a game, go through the cert process, and so on.

If it doesn't specifically say game industry experience, they will generally consider people who has worked in a related industry, such as broadcast software, or advertising, or phone/mobile development, or embedded systems development, or whatever is a reasonably close fit.