How do I get into AAA/console game development?

Keeping skills and engines separate your major problems are: You won't be able to get into a Console or PC related development studio from India. I'm here (Canada) for the same reason. You will not be hired if you are not even in the country, because of sponsorship and visa problems. Hence its better to come to the west and do a small 1 year course in game development so that you can convert your student permit to a work permit i.e if you get a job. Big studios only sponsor people with 4-5+ yrs of experience, not juniors. Even after you are done with the course, there is no guarantee that you will be employed to a AAA studio at all, I waited for 2 years for EA and then forgot it. I don't even want to work there, they have become terrible at layover's and it sucks to be a fresh grad. If you want experience, I would also suggest looking at studios in HongKong, Japan, Singapore and UAE. Studios like Square Enix have their HQ in Japan but the development happens in both Japan and NA. Cost wise the South-east asia solutions or the middleast would be cheaper than anything in NA. Hope that helps.

Hi Anand, You sent me a private message quite a while back, requesting me to provide my opinions on this post, so here I am :) I had the same trouble when I was starting out into the game industry in India after college. My career started with an internship at Trine, Mumbai. They were working on a new expansion pack for a PC AAA title so I had nothing to complain about. However, Trine being a small self-funded studio had several problems. Salaries were not on time. The people managing the studio were too inexperienced and hadn't had much experience in the field themselves. The games as a result weren't very good either, and I'll put the blame squarely on mismanagement. That is why I'd suggest that you NOT work for a smaller company, especially in India. Game development requires a very different mindset (open, sincere but liberal, disciplined yet casual, and most importantly bold) which you'll not see in most Indian studios. The only option is to work in an Indian branch of a foreign AAA company. You will be exposed to a more authentic game development culture at work. Think EA and Ubisoft. EA makes mobile games. EA is aggressively hiring and they offer a much higher compensation than Ubisoft Pune. But they work on mobiles and that's not what I dreamed of growing up as a child. So EA is out of the question. That leaves Ubisoft. Without violating any NDAs I can tell you this much - Ubisoft Pune works on the Just Dance series of games. The games are released on not 1 but 6 consoles!! - Wii, WiiU, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and the Xbox One. Also, we don't work in seclusion but in active collaboration with 2 other foreign Ubisoft studios. Look here: https://www.ubisoftgroup.com/en-US/press/detail.aspx?cid=tcm%3A99-147924-16&ctid=tcm%3A95-27313-32 I personally have worked with the PS3 and X360 for this title. I've spent several months in Paris working with the team there with people who worked on Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, you name it. Imagine, I was in class 11 in school when these people I met were working on stuff like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. And here I was having a drink while discussing code with them at work. It was a dream come true :) Now here's the good part - Our team is hiring. We need more programmers. We can't expect to find an experienced talent pool in India so the strategy is to hire smart people early and then train/mentor them so they can grow into real console developers. It could be just what you need. And if you already have some game dev experience, that's only better! Let me also tell you about the scene abroad. It's tough. The standard of technical education in the west is exceptional. If you're right out of engineering school, I doubt you can compete with them skill for skill. I couldn't have. What you can do though, is get some experience in a console dev team in India and make up for the time we lost in engineering school. Get 3-4 years of experience and then leverage that to find better opportunities abroad. Just make sure you learn as much on the job as is humanly possible. And don't bother about the rest - I have 6+ years of experience now and I routinely get calls from Canadian and UK based head hunters trying to place me in European and Canadian studios. Once you have experience on consoles, you're like human gold for the job consultants! :) PS: For personal development I would recommend you look into getting yourself a subscription to the Unreal 4 engine. 19$ a month but you get the source code with it. You can keep the source code even after the subscription expires. Sigh... I just wish I had these opportunities when I was younger :-/ PPS: I would STRONGLY recommend against doing a course in game development/design. Those courses are too broad and they try to concentrate on too many things in too short a time span. Nothing beats real world experience and the big AAA studios know that. If you want to be a programmer on AAA console games, you NEED to show previous console experience on a decent game. There is absolutely no way around it. If it sounds tough, it's because it is. But on the other hand, programmers are paid more than artists, designers, testers and sometimes even their own producers :P Books: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1265/must-read-game-development-books My favorites are: C++ - The Effective series (Effective C++, More Effective C++, Effective STL) Game dev - Game engine Architecture by Jason Gregory (http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Second-Edition/dp/1466560010/ref=dp_ob_title_bk) and the whole Game Programming Gems series. Game Engine Mathematics - Eric Lengyel's book on game math (http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Programming-Computer-Graphics-Edition/dp/1435458869/ref=pd_sim_b_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1F3AWHT0EWDSD1P58NWV) Long story short: Apply and get into Ubi Pune so that you start accumulating console experience ASAP, spend 3-4 years and finish reading these books in that time. Do this and the AAA studios will come looking for you. And I'm not even exaggerating :) Hope this helps.

Hey Mr. Malhotra, glad to know you're already on a path to dig deeper in game industry :) To answer your questions (IMO): 1. What skills should I posses to break into the AAA gaming sector.  (Graphic Libraries, 3D engines, what choices should I make ?) Get to know as much as possible about every API you can get your hands on (DirectX, OpenGL...). Study and make samples in Unreal, Unity and CryEngine (if possible). The more you know, the better. Since your aim is pure AAA console, you should dig more in Unreal/ CryEngine. Scripting, in them and creating your plugins can help you out. 2. To break into the Console gaming Industry, how far will my experience with mobile game development help ? It depends. If you are already working on libraries, C++ it can be of help. It is hard to say though... as the companies will demand proper work experience in console space. Your side projects and samples could help you out there. 3.  Since I find no scope for gaming here, what would be my chance in  trying for studios outside India ? What steps should I take? Same as above, work on samples and side projects. However, VISA eligibility is way more important (+contacts outside) - especially if you want to try in US, UK. Saying that, you still need to earn some experience here (preferably working in a company) - as that could help you in earning VISA (not all the time though).

As you said there are very few people in India who are actually into console games. More over you need to realize that the mobile boom has changed the game industry completely. Console games are only being developed by big companies because the license to put games on consoles is very expensive. That is why indie game companies prefer mobile over console, as the license is affordable. Big game engine like torque, unity, unreal they do publish for consoles too. If you have already designed few games, try to acquire the license for  playstation from sony  yourself and publish the games on console. That will help your resume when you apply for big game companies. Quite frankly gaming industry is very tough now days and console is already becoming a very hard niche to go into. If you go that path make sure you are very determined and persistent, you might not get results fast.

Most of the folks have already answered you in detail. Here are few things from my end : Big studios you are aiming for already have their own framework/engine or extensively modified existing game engines. If you are aiming for those companies, then give yourself some time to get acquainted with couple of key things for the future. C++11 Multithreading Opengl 3+ or DirectX API Knowing about mobiles is a plus as optimization techniques for mobiles do help you a lot. Vector & Matrices Any networking & Physics library Obviously you can't master everything, so choose your domain and strengthen your basics. No matter where you land, basics will reduce the time you take to get used to new codebase and technologies. Last but not the least, don't give up. :-)

My question got merged into thus one but I don't think the answers here apply to me. I'm already an experienced developer (20 years in web and mobile development). I'm asking from the perspective as an indie developer that wants to start developing my own games. I've worked in several high- level languages but also C and assembly language. I like to know the financial and technical requirements to start ?