Duty calls – a career in video game production

“I initially wanted to go into gaming as a programmer or an engineer because I studied a computer science course at Nottingham, but it turns out I was pretty mediocre as a programmer!” So says the Nottingham graduate who is now the Chief Operating Officer at the developer responsible for one of the biggest selling series in console history. Our first piece of careers advice from Andy Wilson is to not be afraid of realising your strengths can lie outside of the subject you studied.

Sledgehammer Games was founded in 2009 and has been one of several studios developing titles in the Call of Duty franchise since 2011. As of 2023, the series had sold a not inconsiderable 500 million units worldwide, receiving numerous awards and critical praise. Andy’s own gaming experience began back in 2005, but not before four frustrating years attempting to crack the entry level.

“I reset myself a bit and thought ‘I know I want to work in this industry, so what are the things I'm interested in within the industry that I'm good at?’ It turned out that organising people and project management is where I excelled. I saw a professional through line there, and I was already working in project management at an investment bank at the time.

“I looked at the transferable skills that I could build in that role that would then set me up for working in the games industry. I found someone who was interested in bringing in experience from outside of the industry, who felt I could be a fresh pair of eyes, but with a fundamental skillset that was transferable into games.”

How the industry has levelled up

Back in 2001 when Andy graduated, the gaming landscape was about to welcome the arrival of the original Xbox, alongside the recently released PlayStation 2. The longstanding rivalry between Nintendo and SEGA was drawing to a close with the discontinuation of SEGA’s Dreamcast console and its transformation into a games publisher, rather than console creator. For a budding programmer it was a vastly smaller environment than the one you find in 2026.

“There are far more opportunities available in the industry today, there are many more companies and many more types of games that you can work on. The kind of game I work on, Call of Duty, what we call a AAA experience, the teams are in the hundreds. When I started my career working on a game called MotoGP in 2005, we had a team of about 20 people. So the budgets, the team sizes, the complexity has all gone up, the production values and what we're capable of building now has changed massively.”

According to the trade body Equity, the UK gaming industry employed around 47,000 people as of 2022 and in the USA this rises to between 250-300,000. Andy explains how this lends itself to a diversity of opportunities: “There's a massive breadth of roles within the modern version of the industry. You don't just have to be an engineer. You could be a gameplay engineer or an AI engineer focusing on things that are happening in the game. You could be an engine programmer or rendering programmer, or an online programmer focusing on the really deep technical things.

“You could be a tools programmer, which is the abstraction layer between the content creators, the artists and designers. The same is true on design. You have a wide array of subdisciplines. Then there's production as well, which is the logistical glue that binds the team together and takes care of a lot of the air traffic control on any given project.

“Within that, there's all kinds of skills that you can build: technical skills; project management skills; soft skills like being a good communicator, being collaborative, dealing with complexity as well that are hugely important.”

^{Photos from Andy's recent talk on campus - 'Getting into Games: Advice and Insight'}

Going on stream

Another huge shift in the industry is the change from physical to digital – both in terms of how games are accessed (over 90% of all gaming purchases are now downloaded rather than physical) and how they are promoted. As Andy explains: “It's now important to make games that look appealing to play, as opposed to just being fun, because there are millions of people who like to watch other games being played.

“If you're a smaller team with a more constrained budget, that can be a valid pathway for you to get your game out there. You’re not necessarily constraining yourself because you're still going to make a fun experience, because that person's going to choose to play it and stream it in the first place. It's definitely changed a lot of the dynamics, particularly in the way that we talk about our games and how we engage with our audiences. It's a much more direct relationship now with our audience, which is a positive thing.”

Choosing your character

With the increase in variety of roles available in the industry, Andy guards against complacency when it comes to following a broader career path: “I made mistakes early on because I didn't focus quickly enough on a particular area. That lack of focus cost me quite a lot of time in terms of getting into the industry.

“If you want to be an engineer, you don't need to decide upfront whether you want to be a gameplay engineer or an AI engineer or a rendering engineer. Just try and figure out whether you want to be an engineer, a designer, a producer, or an artist. If you can limit yourself to an individual discipline, you’ll have so much more focus going in, which is very attractive to prospective employers. The counter is also true. A lack of focus can be a negative because you're looking at someone and going, ‘Well, you've not really figured out what you want. I'm offering you a specific job, and you're telling me you could do anything.’ That's not as attractive in our industry as you might think.”

Circling back to Andy’s experiences here at Nottingham and how they helped to prepare him for a career, he’s adamant that a university education was crucial: “There's so much intangible growth that happens over those three years that I think is incredibly valuable. When people are talking about the cost of going to university now, I think there's so much that you get from it beyond just what you learn in your course that sets you up really well for your life and your career beyond that.”