As Will Smith’s Dad once told him, “You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been”. With that in mind I thought I’d write about my story about how I got into the Games Industry and where I want to be in the games industry. Also, this entire first paragraph may or may not be an excuse for me to embed this music video:
Now that we’ve gotten our daily recommended dose of 20th Century Will Smith, let’s talk about how I got into the Games Industry.
The Beginning
I graduated from college in 2008 with a degree in Biomedical Engineering. My job options coming right out of school were pretty straightforward: I could go work for a large biotechnology firm helping in the deisgn of heart valves and other medical device or I could go back to school for a Master’s degree or a PhD and hopefully score a better job after a few more years of training//learning. I wasn’t really in the mood for that so I joined the ranks of thousands people to consult the oracle of knowledge that is Craigslist.
As I browsed the gigs and jobs section of Craigslist looking for a place to work I passed over the typical job options like “data entry”, “associate engineer”, or “marketing associate” and as I went through the pages upon pages of classified advertisements one particular post caught my eye - the ad was for a paid internship at a “local game industry startup”. In that moment I had a decision to make: do I go for a job doing what I spent 4 years in college and a good amount of my parents’ money preparing for, or do I stake a claim in the world of video games? I made my choice, and after a few interviews, I got my job as a “Product Intern” at a company called gamerDNA.
Job 1: Product Intern and Product Specialist
gamerDNA was a unique startup. We were building what was known is buzzword-speak as a “social network for gamers”. The idea behind the site was you would join gamerDNA, plug in your Xbox Live, Playstation, Steam, and Xfire data so that we could aggregate the types of games you played and recommend new games to play as well as people to play games with. My first duties on the job were pumping through QA assignments on the site making sure things weren’t breaking on our weekly updates, as well as doing great things like managing our internal forums and answering questions from our members. It was a pretty simple job with repetitive work, but I was getting paid to do work at a company surrounded by games, and with people who would have weekly Unreal Tournament matches during our lunch breaks (awesome!). After a few months as an intern I was promoted to a full-time job as a Product Specialist, empowering me with a business card and a slightly bigger paycheck - I’ve officially started my first job in the games industry.
Job 2: Ad Operations Manager
As gamerDNA grew we started looking for ways to utilize the anonimized data that we were capturing about gamers and one of those involved building an ad network. An Ad Network is essentially an organization of sites that take media orders from ad agencies and marketing firms and distributes those advertisements in the form of banner ads to various websites that put gamerDNA’s ad tags on them. I sat down in a meeting with our CEO and he asked me “Imran, we could use your help on our new ad product, would you like to try advertising on for size?” I went for it, as it seemed interesting, and my job shifted to a role where I spoke to media companies and leading game fan sites about advertising through and generating revenue from the gamerDNA Ad Network.
Sadly, gamerDNA as a whole was a company that couldn’t get itself off the ground and was eventually acquired by a company in New York called Crispy Gamer. I still had a job, but this meant that I had to travel to New York from Boston 3 times a week to meet with the Crispy team, but this repetitive travel schedule wasn’t something that I wanted to repeat time and time again. My former VP of Business Development at gamerDNA was consulting for a voice over IP middleware company at the time, and a few weeks after I shot him a note I was starting my first day of work at Vivox.
Job 3: East Coast Sales Director
Vivox is a company that sells voice over IP middleware for games - what does that mean exactly? Well, if you’ve ever played a game like Eve Online or the recently zombified APB, you’ve used voice chat technology that was built by this company. Now, in order to get this technology in games they needed someone to sell the idea of a voice over IP product to game developers. This was my job. I was given an expense account, a sales target list, and a login to Salesforce - I was now officially a middleware salesman. This sales environment was no where near as high-pressure as what you see in the movies but it was still an interesting job with challenging quotas to meet on a quarterly basis. However, as I began to see a change in the games industry away from hardcore games to more mobile, social, and casual experiences, I began to get a little antsy. Luckily, a recruiter called me one fateful day in November of 2010 and told me about an opportunity at a company called MocoSpace...
Job 4: Business Development Manager
So here I am now, I do business development for a mobile games company called MocoSpace. We build games for the mobile web with HTML5 and we have a darn good time doing it. I still hit up trade shows (although E3 isn’t so big for the social/casual bunch) and I still get to meet my heroes in the industry (my favorite moment of all time was being taken to the “business floor” at a past E3 and walking around the halls with people like Peter Moore and the Bioware Doctors just chilling around). I still do what I love doing - talking about games with people who make and play games.
So, there’s a brief overview of my career so far. The games industry is a fun one and I’m sure that I’ll have some more detailed articles about various aspects of the business. If you have any questions about some of the stuff that I write about. feel free to comment or shoot me a PM.
Log in to comment