Hey folks,
I was hoping I could leverage some opinions from those of you that have jobs in the gaming industry.
Situation: I finished a project management contract at the end of January and have been looking for a new gig. 37 of the 56 jobs I’ve applied for have been at gaming related companies, with most of them in the city that I live in. The majority of the roles that I’ve applied for are Producer, which sounds like the equivalent of a Project Manager.
Profile: I’ve been in enterprise software development for 8 years (5 dev, 3 project management/scrum master). I’ve been game designing on my own for 7 years. I created my own portfolio showcasing what I’ve worked on, which includes a published VR game on Steam, a TTS mod, 5 tabletop games, and info on my two mobile games in progress.
Problem: I haven’t had a single interview in 6 weeks. Am I doing something wrong?
I know I kept this pretty high level, but any insight would be super helpful as I’m feeling a bit hopeless.
Cheers
Will
Being a project manager in an enterprise software company is nothing like a producer in a games studio. Sure some of the tasks and software you use is similar, but everything else isnt.
Usually a producer will have knowledge of the game industry and will have been an ex QA, dev, artist, designer etc. Not as in doing it in their own time, actually on a commercial production.
Source: Took a MSc in video game enterprise and production (Basically the sony accredited producer MSc) which I got a scholarship for sony from. My classmate is now a producer on Red Dead 2 at rockstar in scotland. They are the only one to land a producer job, and they were in QA for about 5 years before they went back to uni just to study that games course so they could get the job. Its seriously competitive and you wont stand out from the people who have the XP and background.
Sorry but its going to be a massive uphill battle for you to get a producer role. You may want to look at taking any gaming gig you can get, even QA, to get your foot in the door. After that itll be uphill. Good luck!
That tells me, your CV either isn’t up to required quality, sending to en masses, and / or just generic.
You always should send CV and cover letter, specifically tailored for particular job and company. Otherwise, you ask straightaway, to dump your CV at first review process.
That means, spend some time, research companies and focus on particular selected positions.