I want to work on video games, any idea how hard it is to enter the game industry as an SDE with no prior game development experience?
If you don’t have game experience and you aren’t a wizard at graphics engines or AI or weird ass networking code then... you could transfer in as the lowest level if you are lucky.
It's not impossible but you'll be taking a huge TC cut
You could always see if you can do an internal transfer to Amazon Game Studios
Be ready to give up some TC to work in the game development
If you have good knowledge of building on AWS and can be Scrappy and super self sufficient then you can work in games. As others said you'll take a huge pay cut. You'll likely end up learning c++, python, basic game math, and low level networking depending on if you start at a small place or at a big place you'll learn their framework. Prepare to be wrong a LOT. DM me if you want to know more.
There is definitely transferrable knowledge from Amazon SDE to Game development. In games we have UI, backend, networking, data engineering and use the cloud as in many other tech companies. I am speaking from a casual mobile game developer perspective here. In more hardcore games you also have all of that but probably most of the people is working on more specialized stuff. TBH I wouldn't lowball myself by joining at the lowest level just to get into the gaming industry though, as others suggested. For sure your previous experience will be useful to the company. Agree with others in that TC is way below that of the tech industry :(
Don't do it. Not worth it.
You can easily make the switch with your experience at Amazon.
As someone who has hired many engineers into multiple game studios, I can tell you that not having game industry experience is not a problem at all. Yes, there are some roles where game experience is important, but there are *many* more roles where it is not. Having experience at Amazon will more than offset your lack of game industry experience.
Why will an Amazon SDE enter game industry in which you don't know where, when, how you will be fired?
So you're saying I should work at Microsoft game studios instead?
Ohhhhhhh snap! The man had a family!