Ways into the game industry

Three structural things shape every route below, and you should know all three before you choose one.

• New Zealand has no work-based games qualification. No apprenticeship. No traineeship. Nothing where you are employed while you train. Every path on this page is campus study with, at best, a placement bolted on, and most of those placements are studio simulations inside the institution rather than time in a real studio.
• Mentor time is the constraint, not talent. Studios do not turn juniors away because juniors are bad. They turn them away because a senior developer's hours are the scarcest thing the studio owns, and a junior costs those hours before they return any.
• Generative AI is eating the work juniors used to learn on. Tooling code, boilerplate, QA passes, documentation, placeholder art. Broad software data shows entry-level employment down roughly 9 to 13 percent at firms adopting AI while senior employment keeps climbing. I do not read that as the door being closed. I read it as the bar moving. Juniors still get hired, and they arrive expected to use AI and, more importantly, to catch it when it is wrong.

Today's missing juniors are tomorrow's missing seniors. That is the whole argument, and it is why "what should I study?" and "how do I prove I can do the job?" have become two different questions. The rest of this page answers both.

Three questions. You get the discipline you are pointing at, the actual competences it is built from, and the New Zealand options that support it. It points at a role, not a cage. Almost everyone I know in this industry zig-zagged: the producer who started in QA, the graphics programmer who started as an illustrator.

Every provider below teaches something a game studio hires for. Only a few run a dedicated games qualification, and that number went down this year. At the rest, games sits inside a computer science, creative media or CGI degree, which is not a criticism: a good share of the industry is hired straight out of general software and art programmes. The column that matters most is the last one. Ask what work-integrated learning is actually built in, and whether it puts you in a real workplace or a simulated one.

This is the thinnest part of the New Zealand system and you should know how thin before you plan around it. No games apprenticeship. No games-specific junior job board. The country's main tech-internship matchmaker has no confirmed game studios on it. What does exist is worth using hard.

NZGDA represents around 61 member studios, and its public NZ Games Directory is still marked coming soon, so there is no authoritative company list to cross-reference against yet. What follows is compiled from public sources and studio careers pages. Treat it as a worked example rather than a directory. When NZGDA's directory launches, it supersedes this.

Every comparable country reports the same core problem: a skills shortage concentrated at mid and senior level, with the junior rung squeezed. New Zealand is not an outlier here, and that matters, because it means the market is not going to fix this on its own anywhere. Several countries have built the thing we lack, a genuinely work-based and usually paid route into games. Two reasons a student here should care. Some of these you can personally go and do. And all of them are the argument for what we should build.

The IGDA framework refresh, and why the timing matters right now

The international conversation about pathways currently runs through the IGDA Game Education SIG, which is rebuilding the IGDA Curriculum Framework. That framework is the map of game development knowledge domains. It was published in 2008 and then sat dormant until 2023. The refresh moves it to a specialty-areas model, and it is on a published clock:

• 2025: data analysis, and a first draft released for public feedback.
• From 1 July 2025: specialty-area committees working through community feedback.
• January 2026: framework content and references reviewed.
• 30 May 2026: second public comment period opens with the specialty-area drafts.
• September 2026: final adjustments, with publication targeted for 30 September 2026.

Two things follow for us. The SIG has said plainly that it has plenty of US voices and could use more international ones, so the comment window is the cheapest way a small country will ever get to shape the framework its own providers end up measured against. And whatever New Zealand builds should track that refresh rather than fork off it. The SIG's other stated projects are an educator knowledge base, an internship clearinghouse, and a rebuild of the Breaking In resources for high-school students. Those are precisely the three holes this page has just documented in our system.

The broader point is that nobody needs to invent the vocabulary. ESCO codifies digital games designer, developer and tester as distinct occupations with full skill lists. O*NET has video game designers. SFIA 9 covers the technical roles across seven responsibility levels. The IGDA framework maps the knowledge domains. What almost nobody has solved is delivery: who employs the learner, who mentors them, and who pays for the mentor's time.

Everything above shares one failure. There is no shared definition of job-ready. Every provider describes its graduates differently, so a studio cannot compare them. A self-taught developer or a career-changer has no standard way to show what they can do at all. And a small studio cannot afford to run deep skills assessment on every applicant, so it defaults to hiring someone it already knows. Gamebadges is the most developed candidate for fixing that. I have been mapping New Zealand tertiary courses against its competences, so what follows is a discussion of the case, including the reasons to be careful about it.

What it actually is

Gamebadges is an EU-funded competency framework that grew out of the Chips for Game Skills project. It describes game development as 9 clusters holding 143 competences across 33 role areas. Each competence is written at three tiers, bronze, silver and gold, in concrete "is able to" statements rather than course titles. That last detail is the one that does the work. You can argue with an "is able to" statement. You cannot argue with a course code.

The badges themselves are Open Badges. Since Open Badges 3.0 landed in 2024 they are W3C Verifiable Credentials, so they are tamper-evident and portable between institutions, employers and countries.

Browse the whole map below. This is the real catalogue rather than a summary of it, all 143 competences, with the bronze descriptor on each.

Why it is interesting, depending on who you are

The hard part: who assesses it, and why would a studio believe it?

A badge is worth exactly as much as the trust a hiring studio puts in it, and that question is unsolved. Three models, and they can be mixed by tier.

The sensible compromise is a tiered hybrid. Bronze provider-accredited, because it is low stakes and high volume. Silver cross-accredited or industry-endorsed, because that is the tier that changes a hiring decision. Gold judged by an industry portfolio panel. That way scarce senior time is spent only where it moves an outcome.

Whichever model wins, credibility rests on moderation rather than on any individual assessor. A shared rubric, which the tier statements already are. Sampling and calibration by a panel, the way external examiners work. Provenance on every badge recording who assessed it, against what evidence, and when. A conflict-of-interest rule that bites at silver and above.

Is this just a micro-credential?

Adjacent, not identical, and the difference is worth being precise about because the two can be combined.

Both are granular, stackable signals below the level of a degree, and both suit career-changers, upskillers and a narrowing entry pathway. The strongest end state is probably the combination. A provider wraps a cluster of badges inside an NZQA micro-credential: the badge says what capability was demonstrated and keeps it industry-anchored and portable, the micro-credential gives it formal standing and access to funding.

The people who hire here say the same things every time. Make things. Work with other people. Keep going when you get knocked back. None of that needs enrolment, money or anyone's permission. Your first game can be tiny. It should be tiny.