This, too, was right out of the Hollywood experience. If there's one significant difference between the game industry and Hollywood, however, its in the presence of women. While female producers and directors may still be a scarce commodity in film, women make up a significant percentage of the production designers. But most game designers are gamers and men play a lot more computer games than women. This is the case even in the cinematics department, which relies heavily on common filmmaking tasks such as editing and sound design.
People go from gamer to employee.
Samia notes a different problem with people coming from mainstream computer graphic effects companies. Most CG houses are very big and specialized, and the programmers there tend to be specialized, too. They'll have one person who only does textures or something. For games, they need to be more generalized. Blizzard's cinematics team, a tightly knit family of programmers, consists of seven regular artists plus three sound designers.