Summer 2025 Game Development Student Internship Roundup, Part 2

Internship recruiting season has begun for some large game publishers and developers. This means that a number of internship opportunities for summer 2025 have been posted and will be collecting applicants. Internships are a great way to earn some experience in a professional environment and to get mentorship from those of us in the trenches. If you’re a student and you have an interest in game development as a career, you should absolutely look into these.

This is part 2 of this year's internship roundup. [Click here for part 1].

I'm on BlueSky now

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For your first question about what kind of non-creation teams there are:

Game dev studios typically have internal support teams - back end, build, IT, user research, etc. that are primarily there to support game development and content creation efforts. Game publishers have a much broader set of teams including marketing, localization, QA/Cert teams, licensing, and so on. There's definitely jobs to be had in those groups, depending on your skill set and interest level.

For your second question:

It's probably because of the interface design. When you have a mouse, keyboard, and scroll wheel it's a lot easier to navigate through a lot of options than it is when you have a controller. They probably looked at the numbers from previous games and realized that most console players only play 1-2 characters at most, so they provided the necessary support that the vast majority of their console players would ever use.

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It's important to remember that you're still in your early levels and there's a lot of the tech tree you haven't yet explored. In the ideal scenario, you'll manage to find a job in the industry and use it to level up your skills. You'll be able to earn the skills and experience needed to make your dream game real while building other games and seeing some best practices in action.

Outside of the ideal scenario, I think that finding a job that can pay the bills and leave you with enough free time to spend on your passion is a worthwhile endeavor. The amount of crossover from regular software engineering and game development is not nil, and leveling up in software engineering is a net positive towards making your dream game work out too... and programming generally pays a lot better than indie dev work. You can even consider the day job as a means to earn some funding to build a demo that you can use to shop around for investors and further funding.

I would caution against starting off with streaming too - these are two entirely separate pastimes and require different sets of skills. I don't know how you operate - maybe you're naturally gifted at juggling multiple things at once or perhaps you have the gift of the gab so that you can keep an audience engaged while speaking into the void and also concentrating at the same time. I just know that it's difficult enough getting started without a lot of experience in one thing, let alone multiple things at once.

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Consultants have as much power as the studio or publisher gives them. When Nintendo hires a consultant to act as the team's executive producer/director (e.g. Masahiro Sakurai via Sora Ltd.), then that consultant will have as much power as a director of the project, granting him broad authority to do what he wants. When the Tony Hawk Shred team hired a physics professor to consult on the physics of skateboarding, they tasked him with coming up with a control scheme that felt like actual skateboarding. He didn't have any more power or responsibility than that. In my experience, companies hire consultants to ask them questions about their specific area of expertise and then they can choose whether they want to listen.

I suspect your question is primarily about a particular consulting company about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These folks aren't any different from the WWII consultants that were hired by the Call of Duty team to make sure the games felt real. Consultants are usually there to provide advice and answer our questions. It is up to the company's leadership above them to decide whether to make the choice. A company like Sweet Baby Inc. is generally brought on to answer questions about the representation of people within the game they're consulting on, since that is their field of expertise. Whether the devs doing the narrative design, quest design, cinematic design, character design, item design, etc. take their suggestions is dependent on the decisions of the team leadership.

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Summer 2025 Game Development Student Internship Roundup, Part 1

Internship recruiting season has begun for some large game publishers and developers. This means that a number of internship opportunities for summer 2025 have been posted and will be collecting applicants. Internships are a great way to earn some experience in a professional environment and to get mentorship from those of us in the trenches. If you're a student and you have an interest in game development as a career, you should absolutely look into these.

If you know of any game development internships that aren't listed here, please tell me! I'll try to collect another batch when EA posts theirs as a follow-up.

At time of writing, Electronic Arts was performing maintenance on their recruiting site and should have new openings posted on November 12th 2024. I'll do a second round of internship opportunities once they post, along with Ubisoft and any others I missed.

Brush up your resume and focus on any game dev work you've done. Amateur game dev work counts! Tabletop game mastering counts! Amateur board and card game design counts! Making your own CCG fan sets or draft cube counts! Game jam work counts! These make a bigger difference when it comes to hiring than most other kinds of work experience.

If you need assistance with your resume/CV, cover letter, or have other questions, join our discord and ask. The server is full of experienced developers who can help review your materials and give you suggestions. I also suggest taking a look at my Game Career FAQ. There's a lot of answers in there already. Best of luck out there.

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We rarely want AI allies to overshadow players - doing so will break the power fantasy. Instead, we want them to look like they're fighting and take a while so that the player can be the hero. You should read this archive post about [why we don't want AI allies to be too good or too strong]. TLDR, it doesn't feel fun if the AI allies are too strong.

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They're either making new classes or they're working on the next expansion's new progression paths for the existing classes. If we have enough class designers, we're probably doing both.

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It would not be weird at all. I would try to get your game in front of as many people as you can, get all the feedback you can, and do what you can to improve your game. Get your friends to play it, get your family to play it, get as many people as you can to play it. And then ask them about how they feel about it, what could be improved, how to make things better.

One of the bits of feedback I got for a game I built in my university days has stayed with me for my entire career - a friend of mine said "I was playing your game with my friends and it made me miss dinner." That really made me feel great - I made a game that was fun enough that they would rather play than eat (at that moment). That bit of feedback was a big part of how I knew I had found my career.

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Whenever we design anything, we usually start from the goal and work our way backwards. Our goal for these AI players is absolutely not for them to try to win - that would actually be quite easy, as you say. If we wanted the AI to win, it would always play optimally and, if we wanted, could cheat via inhuman reactions, frame-perfect inputs, utilize CPU-only knowledge, never take a shot that could miss, never make an execution mistake, and so on. However, this is not fun or engaging for players by any stretch. Most players would not want to play against such AI. Our goal is to make AI that players want to play against. That means our goal is for our AI to lose convincingly, much like how parents feign weakness or ignorance while playing with their children.

How do we do that? Well, we can consider the kind of mistakes we expect human players to make and expand on those. Players often overestimate their own resources and overextend. Perhaps the AI spends everything it has immediately and keeps nothing in reserve, leaving itself open after exhausting all of its resources. Players can also play too cautiously, keeping too much in reserve and only spending the absolute minimum. We could make an AI greedy to stockpile resources but only use them when they're near full. Players often tunnel vision on one target and forget to tend other tasks they need to do. We can make an AI do that as well.

These design choices would make the AI players feel more like human players to play against by embracing human foibles as their own driving directives. Similarly, such directives also give the AI weaknesses that a player can observe and exploit to win. If you take a step back, you're looking at the basis for all of game design. We want the players to have a specific experience (e.g. a match that feels like playing another human player rather than an AI), so we figure out what it would take for the player to have that experience, and we construct those bits to convince the player it is happening.

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"Indie" today primarily refers to budget size more than any relationship to a publisher. Many indie games get assistance from small publishers who provide independent studios with marketing, logistic, and funding support. A smaller-scoped game like Unravel (EA), Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown (Ubisoft), or Animal Well (Sony) feels a lot more like an indie game than Star Citizen, Baldur's Gate 3, or Cyberpunk 2077 with their >$100 million budgets. When people use "indie" as a descriptor, they are usually talking about the game's budget.

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You shouldn't email developers directly unless they've explicitly told you to do so. Game devs (especially AAA devs) aren't interchangeable and we don't all work on the same thing, have the same expertise, or even work within the same team. For example, on an enormous game like Call of Duty, there are many hundreds of developers working on it at any given time. They're split up among many different groups - single player campaign, multiplayer, zombies, UI, online back end support, build, tools, and so on. Emailing a dev who works on Call of Duty to give feedback about the zombies mode, for example, would be a literal gamble because they may not even work at the same studio, let alone on the zombies mode. Imagine sending game feedback about a particular item or game mode you dislike to the dev who works on the online store payment processing. What could she do about your feedback? Realistically, she'd just ignore it since she has other tasks to do than figure out which team it should go to and pass it on to someone from that team.

Honestly, the best way to get the feedback to the right people is to go through the proper channels, even though it doesn't feel like it. Most teams have community managers whose job it is to read player feedback and pass it on to the appropriate developers. I know it can be frustrating and feel like "cutting in line" would help, but it really just disappears into the ether 9 times out of 10. I'll also point out that it is highly unlikely to get a meaningful response on this either, because we can't make promises about future content since it's always in flux and because we're often [working 2-3 patches (i.e. 6-9 months) in the future], so any changes to the game likely won't arrive until at least the patches that we're working on ship.

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NPC Escort design has evolved since players had to escort the Defias Traitor to Sentinel Hill way back in 2004. We usually break it down based on the goal of the quest.

If the goal is to protect the escorted NPC, then no real changes are necessary - the player is supposed to stay with the NPC and deal with the threats that appear along the way. If the quest is a "walk and talk" where the NPC provides exposition along a path to show the player certain locations or the NPC follows the player to certain locations, we will often boost the NPC to match the player's speed if the player gets too far ahead. This can cause some strange animation/visual artifacting depending on how fast the player is moving (just how do we expect this NPC to catch up to the player realistically?), so games that place priority into maintaining visual fidelity (e.g. Red Dead Redemption) will have more difficulty with this than games that are ok with players seeing some animation silliness (e.g. World of Warcraft).

The difference between these types of quests is a bigger deal than most players think - the fundamental gameplay is different, so the considerations must also be different. Players tend to lump them together in the same "escort quest" category, but they're quite different at their core. Protecting an NPC from external threats is very different from having NPCs follow the player or get to certain locations and provide exposition along the way.

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It's so players can catch up if they get distracted or stalled by other things like fighting, treasure chests, or whatever. They're purposely slow so that even players with really bad/slow reaction times (e.g. keyboard turners) can still do the quest. If they moved as fast as the player at top speed, those left behind would never be able to catch up.

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The quantity of leaks jumped tremendously starting in 2020, when the world was forced to switch to remote work for the next two years. Operational security procedures up to that point were primarily focused on maintaining security around workers spending the majority of their time working at the office in person. They did not have sufficient procedures in place to guard against a huge amount of internal data being sent back and forth over the internet. The result is, naturally, big leaks.

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The answer to your question entirely depends on what your goal actually is. A boycott isn't a goal by itself, it is a means to an end - usually the players are mad about something and the boycott (or whatever else - review bomb, harassment, doxxing, death threats, etc.) is an attempt at applying pressure to make the developer do something else (among other things like venting a bunch of hurt feelings).

If an angry player wants to vent hurt feelings, then the usual anonymous retaliation methods - review bombing, harassment, threats to quit, petitions, calls for boycott, etc. - are what they usually settle on. These forms of feedback have the lowest overall chances of actually enacting any change and they are the most adversarial of the options, but they are also the way that feels the strongest, like the fan is "fighting back".

If the angry player actually wants to provide feedback, they can do so in a reasonable manner on any officially monitored channel - usually reddit, twitter, official forums, etc. Being honest about what you dislike and why you dislike it is usually enough. If there's enough feedback from enough people, the devs will actually take it into consideration and do it. It's worth noting that this is also the method that takes a really long time to show results. Devs usually don't post responses immediately, and we're [usually working two patches in the future].

Often, the best thing a player can actually do is to find a different game to play. We live in a time where there are so many good games being released that finding a new and interesting game to play should not be difficult. There is often little more than mindset tying a player to a particular game or franchise. Emotional engagement with the players is good for us because it keeps players interested, but the players don't really get that much out of it. I don't think it's super healthy to make a game or franchise a significant part of my identity, so I think it's best to put a little emotional distance between myself and any given franchise. I can enjoy them when they're good, but I can go do something else when things take a turn for the worse. I think more people would do better to take a similar approach.

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NDAs are super common in the game industry. Most games have some kind of marketing/promotional schedule for when information is supposed to drop in order to build interest and excitement about the game's release, leaking can sabotage those plans and hurt or hinder the game's reception. This is the primary reason for signing the NDA. There are no real consequences to signing an NDA unless you really can't keep quiet about the things you're working on. If that's the case, you won't be working in the game industry for very long and are likely in store for some very scary lawsuits. You should be fine as long as you can remember to say "I can't talk about what I'm working on" or "It's a secret" - I've never had a person keep pressing me on what I say I can't talk about after I've said so.

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