How To Break Into Gaming, Advice From A Game Studio CEO

How to break into the game industry, step one, “build lots of bad games”.

Not the words you might expect from the Chief Executive Officer of a co-development game studio. Yet, that is one of Dru Erridge’s most important pieces of advice for new developers.

CEO and engineering leader at Gamebreaking Studios, Erridge got his start working on the Player Behaviour team at Riot Games. There he tackled systemic issues in video game culture, programming features designed to make the gaming environment more positive. “Basically,” explained the gaming entrepreneur, “how do you make 12-year-olds be nice to each other on the Internet?”

After six years, Dru and several of his friends left their positions, and came together to start Gamebreaking Studios which provides technical expertise to commercial members of the gaming community.

Join Dru, as he walks us through his journey into the game industry, and shares his advice for new developers.

Dru's Journey

“In my journey into games, step one was to build lots of games. Doesn't matter how small they are, doesn't matter how big they are, doesn't matter how good they are,” says Dru. “Build lots of games, and be very aware as you go through this program,” referring to Circuit Stream’s Game Development Bootcamp, “or do things on your own, that it's your first time and pretty much everything you can build is bad”.

In 2022, 10,644 games were released on Steam worldwide, and 490,267 mobile games were released on the Google Play Store. However, this is still only a fraction of the number of games that developers create. Many don’t make it to market. Dru is no exception, and has a large catalogue of bad games that he has built. “If you would like to see them, I'd be happy to share them,” he says. This leads to the CEO's second piece of advice.

“Release them anyway.” Dru remarks that while you will learn simply by making games, you will learn even more by putting those games out into the world, “even if it's just handing it to your friends at first,” he says. To showcase his point, Dru explains what happened when he released the first game he ever made from start to finish, called Mage Defense.

An in-game screenshot of Mage Defense.

The idea was simple, players had to protect the medieval castle from the stormtroopers with their magic. (As to why stormtroopers and fantasy mages are even in the same universe, well not even Dru knows the answer to that one.) Feeling proud with his creation, he shared the game with his family and friends to play. Just one problem, they had no idea how to play the game!

“So, that was my first piece of learning by handing my game to someone else,” says Dru. “There's this whole other part of the game which is just like teaching other people how to use it.”

A year or two later, making games all the while, he picks the next game to release, except this time on the Android App Store.

“I put in the tutorial text, so people would know how to play… I spent like 100 hours just tuning and I was really proud of this game,” Dru reflects. “Then, I think over Christmas break that year, I released it on the App Store. And it turned out people did not agree with me."

Comments on Dru’s game.

After the initial shock of finding out that not everyone thought the game was as great as he did, Dru stepped back and took a hard look at what people were really telling him. He discovered two themes, the game’s controls, and its difficulty. He was flabbergasted, he had spent hundreds of hours tuning the controls and difficulty so that it felt just right to him.

It turned out that was the problem. Dru remarks, “It was tuned to me as a 100-hour player instead of to the person who just picked it up and was a 5-minute player… So, I needed to make [a] smoother ramp into the game”. This is Dru’s final piece of advice, “listen to feedback and do it again, but better”.

“Actually, despite all these horrible reviews, this game was actually really meaningful to me, and I took that feedback,” he says. “...This game was kind of the key thing that got me my first internship at Microsoft. I showed it off to some of the interviewers and I think that was really the thing that got my foot in the door.”

“So yeah, build lots of [bad] games.”