This idea is extremely prevalent in the games industry and I'm really not a fan of it. It doesn't matter how good of a developer you are, what complicated projects you're working on or have shipped, if you don't have a portfolio of games you've made then you might as well not bother.

Which if you think about it is a real issue. Imagine applying at a courier company for a developer role and they keep asking you about the tracking software you've built, parcel measurement integration you've done etc., instead of asking you about your development skills. Having done those things is of course a huge bonus, but excluding 100% of people that don't have that experience excludes a great majority of candidates that could have been a great fit.

The problem is even bigger than that if I think about it. In this example they don't want to know about individual pieces of industry relevant software that you've built, they are expecting you to have shipped enterprise wide solutions that fit the criteria and that doesn't match your skillset. The role they're advertising might be a senior tech lead/developer, but you're not being hired as a programmer, you're being hired as a game maker. They want you for the games you've shipped, not for the code you've written.

Does your little games have "juice"? That's going to get you hired 100%, but mainly because of your skills as a designer, artist, tester, audio engineer etc., coding only made up 20% of that package.

> It doesn’t matter how good of a developer you are, what complicated projects you’re working on or have shipped

You’re bringing the topic of industry experience into a thread about how to get your first game dev job. If you have industry experience, you have a different problem, and there are different recommendations. The question at hand in this article, and from the comment you replied to is how to start getting industry experience, when you haven’t shipped anything before.