Katherine Winter

It’s unfortunate that many qualified individuals miss out on opportunities because they aren’t aware of positions suited to their skills. Enterprise companies often struggle to properly articulate their need for creative and interactive skill sets, which are similar to those in the gaming industry. Many times, they don't know how to accurately describe or validate these needs. When trying to build internal capabilities, positions are often mislabeled based on traditional standards, leading to confusion and missed connections. For instance, companies may assume a developer with Blender knowledge can serve as a 3D artist, which is not the case. Or they might label such a position as a designer or another term that a 3D artist wouldn’t typically search for. This mislabeling creates a disconnect between the job listing and the talent pool. Additionally, the recruitment process itself can be flawed. I’ve seen applications rejected based on the personal biases of recruiters who may not have an artistic background. This means many talented individuals never make it to the interview stage, which is disheartening. The issue lies not with the recruiters but with the organization’s inflexibility and outdated processes. Consider a retail company wanting to enter the metaverse or interactive 3D space. How should they proceed? Should they hire internally to manage the initiative, bring in consultants for strategy, or hire an external expert? And how can they ensure this external hire is capable of building a new department or capability if the person hiring them has no experience with that industry? Chicken and egg situation I guess. With so many people in need of work and companies eager to develop strong interactive, digital, and gaming capabilities, some guidance is crucial. Accurate job descriptions, better validation processes, and an adaptable organizational structure are key to bridging this gap. If your company is looking to navigate this complex landscape and needs help finding the right talent or structuring your team, get in touch. Might be able to provide the guidance you need to succeed.

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At Uncapped Games I'm helping to develop my favorite game I've ever worked on professionally by far... and surprisingly it's an RTS. This is surprising because I (unlike nearly the whole team who are RTS powerhouses), have basically no RTS experience at all. Fire up Super Smash Bros and I may have a shot to impress, but RTS has been a huge - and fun - mental shift for me! ...and somehow, I've gotten pretty good! (At our game at least 😅). Very excitingly, we're on the schedule to say more about our game at SGF ( https://lnkd.in/e5uDTwZp ) in June, but now, kicking things off so to speak, we've put out a really cool documentary that explains some of our philosophies, hopes, and goals. If you're an RTS nerd - or just curious to learn more, check it out: https://lnkd.in/eQpxP3WZ

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🕹Today in Gaming History!🎮 40 years ago today King's Quest released for PC from Sierra On-Line and IBM. #TiGH #GamingHistory #Gaming #History #KingsQuest #Sierra #IBM #PC #Adventure #Games #Game #VideoGames #VideoGame #GamesIndustry #VideoGameIndustry

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Today I want to talk a bit about the resources on amirsatvat.com, specifically Category 2: Coaching. I know you're thinking "here comes another wall of text from John". And honestly? You're right.... But it feels like people might be scared or nervous to use these resources, and I want to help because they are too important to ignore! For those not aware, part of the resources that Amir Satvat has assembled include four types of coaching: Mentorship, Resume/CV/LinkedIn Reviews, Mock Interviews, and Art Portfolio Reviews. You can go on his site, navigate to one of these resources, and find a list of people in your field or area of expertise who have volunteered - FOR FREE - to help with these four critical coaching areas! I personally signed up as a potential Mock Interviewer and Mentor, and in the months that I've been on the list only one person has reached out for help. ONE PERSON! So today I wanted to talk about how to get started using those resources. First off, a huge thank you to Luis Pino, not only for being the only person to reach out to ask for help with a Mock Interview, but also for allowing me to share this experience as an example of the right way to do it! Luis kicked things off by sending me a simple message on LinkedIn titled "Amir Satvats Mock Interviews", and in it he very briefly explained his situation: that he found me through the Mock Interviews workbook and was hoping I could help since he is pursuing production opportunities. This was the perfect first message! Simple, clear, and to the point. I immediately knew what he was looking for, and that it wasn't just another spam message trying to sell me something. From there we talked a bit about his situation, and I had him send me his resume and a few Job Description examples from roles he was targeting so that I could prepare mock interview questions. The mock interview was good, and we spent a couple of hours going over all the feedback that I had for him. The conversations were going so well that we decided to keep them going, and moving forward I will be helping Luis as a mentor as well! I'm hitting the character limit again, so here are the key takeaways from this story: 1.) Don't be afraid to use the coaching resources! People like me signed up as volunteers because WE WANT TO HELP! 2.) Start with a simple message! It doesn't have to be anything crazy, just a few lines about looking for some coaching help through Amir's website. (template below!) 3.) If it goes well, keep it going as a long-term mentorship! Coaching Request Message Template: Title: Amir Satvat's [INSERT COACHING TYPE HERE] Description: Hello, My name is [INSERT NAME HERE] and I found you through Amir Satvat's coaching resources. I am currently looking for someone to help with [INSERT COACHING TYPE HERE], and I was wondering if that is something you would be willing to help me with? Any help you can provide is greatly appreciated! Thanks, [INSERT NAME HERE]

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🕹Today in Gaming History!🎮 20 years ago today Spider-man 2 released for PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and Game Boy Advance from Treyarch, The Fizz Factor, Digital Eclipse Entertainment Partners, and Activision, in association with Marvel Entertainment and Sony Pictures Entertainment. I remember being absolutely floored with this game on release, a must have! Played so much of it and the other movie games. It's great that we're still getting Spider-man games, and even more recently got another Spider-man 2 (although unrelated to the movies, aside from in-game skins) from Insomniac Games. #TiGH #GamingHistory #Gaming #History #Spiderman2 #Spiderman #Treyarch #TheFizzFactor #DigitalEclipse #Activision #Marvel #Sony #Movie #Action #Adventure #Games #Game #VideoGames #VideoGame #GamesIndustry #VideoGameIndustry

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"Required: X titles shipped" I've been involved in a few conversations lately with aspiring or junior developers who are frustrated that so many job descriptions require shipped titles. It gets even more difficult when a JD requires specific types of games shipped. These job seekers become more infuriated to find out that a lot of recruiters or hiring managers don't really count their game jam titles or solo games as "shipped" for purposes of these roles. Why is that? What exactly are hiring managers looking for here? Does it even matter? To answer that last question first: yes. It matters. First off, let's be clear on a couple of things here. As a general rule, you shouldn't be seeing shipped title requirements in true entry level positions. In those cases, any experience is better than no experience, so you should call out your jam, student, or solo games whenever you don't have anything else to show (or just call them out anyway if you're still relatively new or you're particularly proud of something you've worked on or built). But the reason you see a lot of jobs asking for shipped titles is less about the end result and more about showing that you've got experience working in a particular environment. If I'm asking, it's because I want to know that you can work on a team in the first place. You've been through the process already and have gone through the reviews and planning sessions and discussions that you simply wouldn't get building a game on your own or even in a quick jam. I've been through this a lot, with games that shipped and those that unfortunately did not. I've seen it on tiny teams where we could fit everyone in a single room and the entire schedule took months to teams which numbered in the hundreds across continents with multiyear schedules and the differences are very real. I've seen how different it can be in having to ship a boxed game through first party submissions or maintaining a liveops MMO that only existed on PC or mobile. Different processes. Different tools. Different methodologies. Different scales. I know how rough the market is out there. I know it seems hopeless at times and utterly unfair. I know it can really hurt to find a role you think you're just perfect for but then you see they want "shipped titles" experience or you need to have "worked on AAA teams" or "must have liveops experience" and it just doesn't make sense. Your challenge is in trying to show how you have the skills without the direct experience, while also competing against others (potentially dozens of others) who already have both. I wish the process could be easier for you. At the least, I hope I've added some context from the other side of the table here.

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Tip for publishing consideration submission to Midwest Games... tldr - Send info through our portal (https://lnkd.in/gWtKgpuU), not through email (or LI). I get that it's a little counter-intuitive...you might think you want to put your info right in front of the sourcing decision influencers' faces. But it's actually a disadvantage - especially those of you who are agents throwing multiple titles at us at once. The submission portal goes right to our database, and that database is there for a reason: to keep an organized and consistent record of all submissions in one place. I look through there all the time. I'm reminded of titles I may have overlooked or need to go back to consider as circumstances change all the time. We rarely, if ever, make immediate decisions or even quick deep review/consideration. Our factors for consideration shift regularly. I do not review your particular email regularly, or at some point even remember you sent one. I go to the database. Connection via other channels is good. Discussion about your game over other channels is good. But having your core game info in those channels is not good. Please use the submission portal!

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Games industry DESPERATELY needs to unionize. Since December my LinkedIn feed has been a sea of people looking for work because they've been laid off, due to the "business strategy" of laying people off when you want to look more profitable in Q1 of the next year, or just "trimming the fat"/ "improving efficiency". I won't say my experience was exactly like this necessarily, but I was recently laid off in January, though I haven't marked myself as looking for work due to many reasons, partly being the lack of jobs, all the bots and spam on this website, and the crushing damage to my self-confidence. Either way, NO ONE should be made to feel this way. I've even heard of people getting laid off mid parental leave, or while they're on vacation with limited internet access, THIS IS DESPICABLE. What's worse is in this industry we all experience imposter syndrome, and anytime this happens you can't help but think we're terrible at our jobs, if only you'd worked harder, spent more of your own time improving your skills, you would be essential enough to the company to keep on, but they still could let you go, so it doesn't even matter. CEOs or in general the entire C-suite of people should be held accountable and publicly shamed. If your business strategy is to hire as much talent as possible, realize you can't keep on all that talent, and then lay them off, then you are incompetent, and should not be given a pat on the back for at least giving severance, when you're just following the lowest requirements of the law. The people who you've laid off are people who have built your company and kept the lights on. You can't just use the excuse, "that's just the way the industry is", that's a weak excuse. There are industries that experience frequent lay offs but have a union and support, such as some plants in the auto industry, and the workers have fought hard for years so that they would have those benefits and salary top-ups. Of course that's not always the case and things could be better, but we shouldn't just sigh and be like "it is what it is", and keep trying to work within the system when the system is broken. I'm just mad right now, for myself, but mostly for my friends, and people I don't even know that work in this industry, because I know these devs are hard working people that are constantly learning and trying to improve, and they are now doubting all their skills and feeling like they're not good enough. As for the people who make these mass lay off decisions a regular occurrence, I would like to say something that may even hurt my career and job opportunities, but deserves to be said, and which many devs would like to say or even scream, Fuck you.

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🎮 As our worlds grow more immersive, patch sizes can be a hassle. Thanks to our software engineering teams, we've rolled out In Place Updates (IPU) to cut down patch times. Read to learn how your favorite EA games are quicker than ever! 🚀

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I've just published https://gdscript.live since it's a tool I've wanted for a few years now, but no one else has seemed to make something similar the feature set I want. The main goal is to help share and test #GDScript snippets for answering #GodotEngine (#Godot4) questions, but I have also added a profiler to help test performance of different implementations of an algorithm/feature (eg: all the different ways of constructing a String); similar to what https://quick-bench.com provides for C++. Everything runs locally in browser. The "Share" button fully encodes the current script within the URL, so sharing examples should be effectively permanent. You can find the script in this image here: https://lnkd.in/gd6QqFbj

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🎮 🔥 Video Game IT Jobs Mega Post! 🔥🎮 Here is an update to my Video Game Career Resources for IT roles. This is version 9, which includes around 150 jobs ⚙ IT job boards:  ❗ Please note: most job boards do not have an IT category, so I had to do a bit of creative keyword searching. You will therefore find duplicates in some of the links, as well as different (and also unrelated) jobs under an "IT" banner, due to the way job boards list those roles. This is out of my hands, so please do check these links yourself and amend the pre-prepared searches accordingly❗ Crackle HQ Jobs: https://lnkd.in/dsPjtT3c Gamejobs.co jobs: https://lnkd.in/dpHysgA4 Hitmarker Jobs: https://lnkd.in/dyxfK4xn InGameJobs: https://lnkd.in/eYYEKQmb Jooble IT jobs: https://lnkd.in/d-hAycYV Outscal: https://lnkd.in/eGddK8_q RemoteGameJobs: https://lnkd.in/eeyDEW8z XP Game Jobs: https://lnkd.in/dVPcb7-p and https://lnkd.in/dW_kFDEp 🌟 Bonus: a few more resources for everyone: 🌍 Not sure what is around you? Try Game Dev Maps - a living map and catalogue of game development organizations https://gamedevmap.com/ 🌍 From the UK? Try the UKIE Map: https://lnkd.in/dubns2sc 🆕 Starting out new in this industry? Try Entry Level Games: https://entrylevel.games/ and Bird's Eye View's Entry Level Skills hub resources https://lnkd.in/eeY7A54n 🏠 Remote jobs your thing: try Remote Game Jobs (https://lnkd.in/e-gds4He), Hitmarker (https://lnkd.in/eUa9sjQa) and Games Jobs Direct (https://lnkd.in/eTRrdfyQ) 🕹 Interested in Indies? Try https://lnkd.in/eWgtyava and Eva Tucker's Indie jobs resources: https://lnkd.in/eRzQYbE8 🎮 Even more Games Resources from our LinkedIn community: Amir Satvat's Games Job Resources: https://amirsatvat.com/ Aïda Figuerola's Gaming Backstage series: https://lnkd.in/ehbDBhyt Matt Hearnden's How to Get a New Job website: https://lnkd.in/eD6Him78 Sara Machado's Jobs Resources hub: https://lnkd.in/eBZJxRiY Jan David Hassel's Game Jobs Search Resources: https://lnkd.in/eYh9NcnV Additionally, please check out (and follow) these amazing people posting jobs regularly: 👉 Alex Gombos 👉 Ali Farha 👉 Andy Fidel 👉 Ash C. 👉 Caitlin Cooke 👉 Caroline White 👉 Hailey Rojas 👉 Kat Craig 👉 Kelly Bender 👉 Kelsy Barredo 👉 Matt Barney 👉 Matt Hearnden 👉 Mayank Grover 👉 Mirko Minenza 👉 Thomas Woodhams ❤️ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! The world is yours for the taking - let 2024 be your year. 👊 #gamesjobsmegapost #it #jobsingames

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Laws of game Dev (Proposed) #5: Sprints, Meetings, & Self-fulfilling prophesies My problem with putting any sort of estimates into the schedule, is at least 50% of time it seems to be giving people permission to burn time and money until the date arrives. After tracking schedules for a few years I noticed that the vast majority of things get done on its due date or later, very rarely does anything get done early. You might try to explain it by people are just painfully bad at estimating and thus never underestimate. But then everything should be running long, the fact that a lot of stuff is hitting the exact due date tells you the distribution curve is still alive and well, but teams just don't closed tasks out early.    The same things happens with meetings, say you need to run through ~20 min of Jira tasks weekly, you book an 1/2 hour so that on weeks with a spike of tasks, your still covered. A short time later you will notice that instead of the meeting sometimes ending in 10 min on light weeks, 20 min normally and 30 min on crazy weeks. The soonest they will ever end is at the 1/2 hour mark and sometimes they will somehow find a way to go longer. I use to believe that maybe this was because the effort to try and move between physical meeting rooms early was so pointless that people just ran out the clock to keep things simple. But then COVID hit and nothing changed, even though people could easily drop out of a video meeting and continue their normal work they rarely did.   So it appears we have two cases of self-fulfilling prophecies. Giving times/dates is not working efficiently but we also know that not giving teams deadlines does not work out that well either. Deadlines seem to be one of the only things that forces teams to make decisions and move forward.    Active monitoring is the key.   If meetings are always ending exactly at the same time, make them shorter. Keep making them shorter until you see the variance of the bell curve. When teams are at risk of running over they will start prioritizing what they want to talk about in the meeting vs in follow up emails/slack. People will start coming prepared, people will start showing up on time and eventually people will have more time to get other work done.   When possible do not give date based deadlines, leave it in terms of dependencies for other work and make sure they clearly understand the benefits to getting the task done and move on. It takes a bit more work to monitor such a schedule, also is harder to plan for when other teams might have dependencies on their work.  But the difference in velocity when people are focused on time till unlocking functionality instead of time till next milestone is incredible.  Just two examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in game dev, there are many more to keep an eye out for. Hit me with any thoughts before this goes in the books.

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Dive into the world of technology with EA's latest update on Boom Tech in EA SPORTS Madden NFL 25. Discover how this technology is revolutionizing the gaming experience.

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📖 Book Review 📖 Just finished *Play Nice* by Jason Schreier, I have to admit - I was done binging the audio book before the physical version arrived - Yom Kippur is a time for repentance after all. I'm still glad I have this to gift to a friend. As always, Schreier delivers top-tier storytelling—his writing is engaging, his humor on point, and the narrative flows effortlessly. He’s one of the best in the business when it comes to capturing the chaotic world of game development. However, while the book offers a gripping account of Blizzard’s rise, decline, and uncertain future, it falls short in one crucial area: it stops at storytelling without offering solutions or deeper analysis. The book lays out key industry challenges—crunch culture, business vs. creative tensions, and the complexity of scaling AAA projects and studios. But just like with Press Reset, Schreier leaves it up to the reader to make sense of what to do next. A missed opportunity, especially when the industry is ripe with interesting examples like Blizzard’s abandonment of StarCraft that led to Tim Morten’s journey to Frost Giant Studios, Inc.. The hard reality of developing a strategy game in 2024 could have sparked meaningful debate about the business realities of game development. Schreier’s wonderful writing captures the industry’s chaos—but we need to take the next step. It’s not enough to document these already-high-profile issues; we need to engage in raising solutions. For those interested in actionable insights, I highly recommend the Deconstructor of Fun podcast—they dive into the complexities Schreier hints at but don’t stop at storytelling. Blizzard was a cornerstone of my gaming journey— my adventures in Sanctuary, Azeroth and Aiur consumed years of my life. But we can’t build the future of this industry on nostalgia alone. Let’s take these stories and use them as fuel to improve the way we work and create. What solutions do you think are needed? Let’s move the conversation forward.

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A simple observation about voice production for games: It pays to embrace sourcing diverse talent early on. You’ll be much better prepared than if you rely on the same talent pools every time. Casting characters is sourcing diverse talent. Building believable worlds is sourcing diverse talent. Creating unique game experiences is sourcing diverse talent. When you’ve worked through finding fresh, diverse voices and know that challenge well? The process of building a truly immersive world becomes a lot easier.

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I was recently asked "What's your three favorite Call of Duty Missions of all time?" As a Designer I don't have favorites the way a player does. I have missions where I LEARNED the most and improved as a Designer. First of these was "Death from Above" the AC-130 gunship mission from COD4. I didn't think this mission would work. I didn't think we could make an interesting mission where the player wasn't in danger. Where there really wasn't a fail condition or a skill test. This was years before Journey and the rise of "walking simulators" and experiential game design. Looking back now I realize that the only emotion I knew how to evoke was fear and I knew for a mission to be successful it had to evoke some kind of emotion. When we finished "Death from Above" and it was successful, loved by players, and super memorable without evoking fear I learned one of the most important lessons of my career. The next big lesson for me was "No Russian". At the time I thought we were going for shock value. The COD equivalent of Postal 2. And maybe we kinda were. BUT there's nothing more important in narrative games than story telling on the sticks. And the fact that we let players CHOOSE to shoot or not, skip the mission or not was hugely important. For millions of our players that was the first time they got to make a choice like this. I'd like to think those players maybe learned a little bit about peer pressure, conformity and their own moral compass. I learned a lot about the difference between games and movies and the importance of player choice. In Modern Warfare 2019 we had a clear narrative theme. War isn't Black and White, its Grey. We get dirty so the world stays clean. These hard choices are made over and over by our characters. Farah disowns her own brother because he uses the same deadly gas that killed their village. Price tells the player not to open the door to the Butcher in the Embassy, and allows the Butcher to kill the innocent father and son to protect the people inside. Virtually every mission had a moment like this where a character had to make a choice related to our theme. But it wasnt until the end of St Petersburg that we gave the player a real choice of where they want to draw their line, how dirty they want to get to make sure the world stays clean. And like No Russian, by giving players this choice we did something that other story telling mediums like books and movies can't do. Something unique to games.

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Laws of game Dev (Proposed) #3: Making More != Greater Fun Far too many gate reviews I have been involved in end with someone saying "the experience is not there yet, but will be once we get more of X created,..." In my entire career that statement has never ended up being true. No shooter has ever finally got engaging once it had 16 weapons to fire. No racing game has suddenly become nail biting exciting only after there was 100's of cars to pick from and dozens of tracks. Patterns of fail: - Games not fun but the team believes that more choices / complexity will somehow create emergent fun. In reality it often just makes game harder to learn and more confusing to play. Sometimes having a mired of choices just leads to decision regret or just straight up annoys people on the conscientious side of the personality traits. - Games not fun but the team believes its because a core system must depend on something else. The designers will point at other games, pick out some other system and say they must go together like "Chocolate and Peanut butter". The other system is created, game is still not fun, team declares something else must still be missing. In reality each core pillar of the game must be engaging on its own. - Games not fun but the teams does not drop everything and fix it right away. Eventually they get so use to it that one day start believing the problem magically went away. Thus an entire game gets built on top of a broken system and by the time conflicting data is surfaced the team is to invested, they blindly ignore it. - "More" in the end solves nothing except the average time to complete game. Don't let teams create excuses, if a little bit of something is not a little bit fun. There is no way 40 hours of it is going to get any better... -Welcome any thoughts before this goes into the books.

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