Session: A Noob’s Journey into the Gaming Industry - Kathy Shin, Activision Blizzard King

[Music] thank you [Music] all right next up we've got a great topic one I can really connect to uh it's a noob's journey into game development I've only been at it 30 years so I'm pretty fresh uh our next speaker I think he is a pretty fresh shoot as well but I think he has some super exciting interesting things to say so please give a warm welcome to Kathy Shin from ABK a little company you may have heard of all right testing Can you guys hear me okay yeah awesome so hello everybody it's very wonderful to be here at Pocket game connects

um I've been living in Seattle for the past five years so very excited to be back here in the middle of a heatwave so kind of unusual for me but my name is Kathy and it's my first time speaking in public and in front of a lot of people you'll get what I'm talking about later but thank you so much for having me here I'm very excited I also work in Mobile gaming as well so I'm looking forward to some of the talks here um real quick about myself I am an avid gamer working in the publishing industry of division blizzard King so I helped to manage all of our technical mobile Partnerships with popular IP that you might know such as Call of Duty and Candy Crush Hearthstone Diablo mortal as well as working on any other new games that we have coming up but my talk here is going to be about my journey navigating throughout this gaming industry to how I ended up working here at ABK I just kind of hope it provides some insight for those who are trying to

get their foot in the industry or if you have any friends or family members who are interested in trying to approach here as well so my journey was a little bit haphazard so it's going to be all over the place I graduated with a degree I didn't really know what to do with um I kept doing a bunch of random different jobs volunteered for all sorts of projects and I even ended up playing some competitive video games for money of which I'll talk about as well but this all started off during my years in college I happened to be near many events that were happening at the time so I was born and raised in Southern California and around that time there are a lot of events happening such as Starcraft 2 tournaments so if you're not familiar with Starcraft real quick that's a real time strategy game where you basically play or command Space Battles and there were a lot of those events happening down in SoCal so this was around I think 2012 at the time but

basically I would attend my college classes during the day and then during that night I would go to these live production events where they're having these like giant virtual game tournaments at stadiums so that was very exciting to just Uber over to or something if Hoover was around back then but over there I met all sorts of people um who had traveled from all over the world so this was super exciting to me um because I was very young I never met all these people from Europe before and they had come over here to compete and to just spectate the games just be here for fun and just watch all the video games happen on the big screen so this really introduced me to a buddy new industry at the time which was Esports gaming and how modern day gaming was going to turn about during this time I also picked up streaming video game so if you're familiar with twitch it is a streaming

platform but first used to be Justin TV back then so people would just um share their everyday experiences over their laptop webcams on the internet and just talk to all sorts of strangers from the internet and this was a very fun experience to share with a community of like-minded folks of course you have some trolls and some weird people online but as long as you block them just move on and just focus on what you want to share to the public it became a really exciting platform to use so this eventually turned into playing video games when Justin rebranded to twitch.tv and that was a more gaming oriented streaming platform so pivoting into this opened many opportunities for me I met a lot of people from events I met a lot of people online from my streaming Channel and it was a bunch of brand building basically where I turned my love of Starcraft 2. I played a ton of it and I started to share that with strangers

online through my twitch Channel there are also other events like more of the tournaments and local meetups like bar crafts happening where you guys will all just meet up at a bar and just watch Starcraft together on the screen and these events really built a lot of relationships I have to this day just because of a video game and for resumes like running a streaming Channel or any other Hobby and project you can talk about and make sense with can go really good on that but of course everything wasn't super clear I was also working in restaurants I was a waitress I was also in retail doing customer service over here in Washington I used to work at the Microsoft stores when they were still around and those are like the same thing as the Apple Stores they had services and products and stuff so I was on the floor I was on the floor associate um selling all this hardware and this was a really great introduction for me because

customer service rules are really great experience even though they may not be directly related to gaming but you get to talk to all sorts of people like every single day you're basically pitching either well in my experience I was pitching food product or software in retail back at the Microsoft store I learned so much about platform economies live game Services Cloud tick and I became very aware of all the tech companies around me being in Washington time I became very cognizant that Amazon was close by and there was Microsoft over in Redmond because I was located so close to HQ a lot of the executives and teams would come over from the company to run tests or talk to people to get feedback so it was a really great way to network as well for my next steps after the stores I started working at Minecraft if you're familiar where I started super entry

level working in the support team so basically if you're playing Minecraft and you have issues with your account or you see a game bug you type up that email send it to support and then I might be the one grabbing a ticket and working on that so and I found this rule over from when a recruiter had contacted me on LinkedIn because he liked my experience in streaming and that I had lived in Washington as well so always make sure that your profile is up to date with all the projects that you've done and put any keywords for anything that you're looking for just so that this can come out of nowhere so I was very lucky in that regard but Minecraft was a super interesting look for me in behind the scenes of gaming because I was still a streamer at the time I was kind of pivoting away from that because I had made enough from my channel to kind of to pay for my rent and to pay for food but savings wise it wasn't really feasible long term it's very

tiring to play Starcraft for 10 hours every single day just so you can pay rent so I was hungry for other things too so I wanted to go more into the industry so I got promoted at Minecraft several times for leading projects when I was approached by Activision Blizzard King again this was through Linkedin and I had actually ignored this message because I thought they didn't even read my profiles like what is this I don't think I can get this but eventually I replied I wanted to meet the recruiter and see what they were looking for so maybe that's something I could work towards in the end I went through several interviews and a couple months later moved down to California to work with the game mobile teams over here so working these roles kind of teach you a lot about the language work Styles and goals of these teams and their companies so some things I recommend to those who are still navigating to the industry is to reach out to your network your friends utilize your social media to see

if you can connect with people who have the job that maybe you're looking for or that might be the next steps don't be discouraged if you don't see a response please be respectful of people's times if they're not responding to you don't take it personally I think people are busier they're just not interested and that's okay so try to run your bios whatever you want to talk about with your friends for any sanity checks before you approach people I've learned from my own experience people are super open to sharing what their insight and their journey in the industry so I can kind of connect it back to my own and see where I want to go next so I've learned so much from really seasoned folks here so my takeaways to you guys are to feel free to reach out to those who work what you want to do introduce yourself politely see if they have any time for this chat 101 get a call over Zoom meet up in person for a copy so they can give

Insight on what's going on that way you know like what goals you need to work towards what projects do you need to take to put on your resume and while you're doing this you can do all sorts of other prop side projects as well for me it was streaming and running my brand Channel it was fun to kind of create all sorts of content for it like maybe I could host things like a video game format have a collaboration with my other streamer friends there's also a ton of events especially along the west coast you have like packs you have tournaments for fighting games um I think what else Call of Duty all sorts of stuff so use those opportunities to like reach out to people and to kind of network with peers you can be really creative with this um what experience you have definitely put on your resume make sure that it kind of makes it makes sense to people

I remember in my past interview when I went to this company I had to talk well I didn't have to but I definitely brought up Starcraft too and that was really amazing for me to share something like that because before I knew or not I knew but I didn't think I wanted to work in the gaming industry my family was super into the fashion industry at that time I think their expectations for me were to get into that but I just kept getting drawn back and back over to gaming so um I've glossed over much but let's see how are we on time nine minutes I've got a lot of time I've glossed over much but I can I can expand upon anything feel free to ask me any questions about my streaming experience working at retail just kind of starting over from scratch to get to where I was at my journey was all over the place I really didn't have a plan I had to take

a lot of questionnaires and be like is this something that I want to continue to do um but the great thing about gaming is people are super welcoming and accepting um you don't have to like dress up in you know business formal suits or anything wear something nice but then they don't have these high expectations they really expect the pet the passion authenticity uh to coming to work so yeah I'm gonna open up the floor if anyone asks any questions if not we can put it short sorry oh there you go Daddy yeah what are you finding are the what are you finding is a relatively new entrant to the industry as the hardest things about working in the industry what really challenges you pushes you what's what's Difficult about being in

there for you um in that already having resilience is kind of tough enough when you present like a project or if there's something that you want to work on uh expect to repeat it many many times to many different people and sometimes the same people it can be really frustrating and I've seen a lot of really talented people just kind of give up already in that case please try to be encouraging just say one more shot but just having that resilience is super important for people entering the industry yeah first of all you should be so proud of yourself what a wonderful talk is it oh thank you public speaking experience appreciate it my question is for uh those in gaming who are looking at um really improving their profile and building their brand either on LinkedIn

or other social media but are not streamers they don't have uh gameplay uh footage to share with others and to build around that like what kind of content would you recommend that they I think first of all focus on what makes you happy I know a lot of streamers in the industry who are like I don't want to play this game anymore but they keep doing it because it's got to pay the bills so really align with what makes you happy kind of work on how you're going to present yourself to people or package work content because I know people who can be competitors and that's it they're just there to analyze at a high level they're just going to play their tournament games but there's others who are not as good but they use that time instead of practicing um maybe they're being Educators it's really so yeah as long as you kind of have a focus on what you want to present yourself as and you're happy with it then I think that's something you should

work on yeah nice to meet you by the way hi hi uh so I know you mentioned earlier LinkedIn was a good way that you got noticed by recruiters you mentioned keywords um what are the biggest tips you could give out for LinkedIn Improvement to help get noticed by recruiters I would say decide on the job title you want it can be specific like I was thinking oh I could be like a project manager in gaming so using that find other people out there um just it's kind of snooping but you're not bothering them you're like it's in the public so it kind of shows you what sort of words they're using to describe their projects and their past experiences um the way I looked at it for LinkedIn I feel like I'm not a recruiter but I just feel like they're looking for specific words to hit where they pull these resumes out and they'll actually approach you like the past two jobs I

was not reaching out to them but they just popped up as messages but that's because I kept my LinkedIn up to date always made sure like even from other job postings I've seen I'm like oh that's a really great line that's actually what I'm doing they just described it better so I'll reformat it as such um one past story on that was Amazon approached me too I did not reach out to of them but they said hey there's this really cool job you should check out let me interview you and I'm super excited they ended up rejecting me but I was like I really like the idea of this job that's why I responded so I kind of got the Bare Bones of that and then pitched it to my manager at Minecraft at the time and I said what if we have a job at Minecraft at those discs and they really liked it so they promoted me into that so if you super important uh don't reuse them from your from the job listings from LinkedIn yeah I hope that answers your question uh yes

yes I can hear you okay um so um I've also got a lot of uh well I find myself uh how exactly completed some of those rules and responsibilities for um so did you use those on your resume as keywords or did you wanted to prevent shine away from trying to be like yes I was a shoot supervisor yeah I had to edit out a lot because when you stand up these resumes people recommend one pagers you can definitely go more but I feel like I approached this with these recruiter staff so much limited time they see the same things over and over again it blurs give them a one-pager give them a big summary of who you are if you're applying for a gaming job you don't have to talk about your past 10 years of restaurant experience I put one blurb just to show them I did have customer service experience I was changing from another industry just to

give an example of my background because that was still an important part of my life thank you yeah yes if you have a audience a twitch audience already do they approach you're approach by people saying like review our games or or do things like that or um yeah they approached me online through my social media especially when I'm at Pax I get a lot of people who want me to Showcase their games to my channel it's a little difficult for me because all I do is play Starcraft so if you take that genre intense real-time strategy games that doesn't really pair well with a gentle puzzle game so I I can kind of play whatever I want because my brand is more like I'm just a gamer I just play these games I don't have to play Starcraft but some content creators have to be really cognizant of that so yeah that's where I do get approached

like the Live Events and online social media yes oh one more question if anyone's got anything yes disappointed that you're missing out on all the chess boxing matches streamers are doing lately is it chess boxing influencer boxing oh yeah it's very creative these days well thank you everybody [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign