That's great, but would you say its industry wide? Because I have also heard (non-gaming) the exact opposite. Also, would he get through HR? They are more often than not, the real gatekeepers. It would require someone to vouch for him personally to go through, and that isn't very scalable when applying for jobs.
Hiring in both gaming and non-gaming is about your resume, phone screen, and interview. The first two are gating factors for the interview. The interview is how the actual decision is made. References are of much less significance, often go unchecked, and are usually focused on simply confirming the truthiness of your resume.
If you spent 3 years of your life working on a game, it's not a gap on your resume. In fact, it's the shining achievement on your resume, and it should get you that phone screen. If you can't tell a good story about hard work and technology mastery from that experience, your problem isn't an HR department, it's that you don't know how to write a resume.
Yes and no. You are still at a disadvantaged even if you write a good resume. As an HR, when I need to fill a job, I search my existing database for candidates. I input keywords such as Unity3d, Unreal Engine, UI, etc. If I know another AAA studio has a specific department with those skillset, I input that studio name (disadvantage #1).
Let's say the candidate pool comes back with 30+ results. I will only interview 10 candidates realistically because I have other jobs to fill too. I will rank those candidates by experience and background. People that work at existing AAA studios always goes on top of the pile because I know their chances of filling the job is much higher (disadvantage #2). If there are more than 10 candidates from AAA studios, then too bad for you. Indie game developers goes to the bottom pile unless their skill set matches exactly what I need. Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates quality.
As an HR, I need to meet quotas. And I have only so many hours to spend per day interviewing candidates. Each candidate takes an hour. Interviewing an indie game developer takes more time because I need to make sure he know his stuff. If I keep on passing indie developers that are not up to par to hiring managers, they will reflect that back to my manager.
> Even then, he/ she is an unknown, for the simple reason, they might exaggerate their experience and AAA studios can guarantee the candidates quality.
This has not been my experience at all. The opposite, in fact. I briefly did hiring at a medium sized game studio. We preferred to hire indie devs with completed games over those with AAA studio pedigree specifically because we can verify that the indie dev actually built stuff himself. He could provide code when asked and talk intelligently about it.
AAA studio developers couldn't share any code (for obvious reasons) and it can be hard to pin point exactly what they did on any given project. When a studio can put anywhere from 10 to 100 developers on a single project, authorship gets fuzzy.
That said, I would discourage the indie dev in question from pursuing a job in the industry. Why would you jump aboard a sinking ship? 1000 people in the games industry have been axed in the last year alone[0].
I don't know why you created this account in order to post your fake story.
But anyone who has ever worked anywhere professionally will see that you have no idea how it works or even what your job title is. (Hint: it's "recruiter".)
I used to work at Blizzard. A designer found an app store game he liked and reached out to the dev with an interview offer. Attending GDC, I've heard from at least a dozen hiring managers that personal projects look better than degrees.
