From a hiring standpoint, the industry is very inbred. Most new hires (except maybe in QA) in my company come from other companies. Our industry can bet that there are a fair deal of experienced (if only slightly) people out there who were either fired after a project ended, quit because of burnout, or are otherwise available on the market, so it's not very common to look beyond this pool.

Academic preparation will usually get you nowhere, and for a programming job it will only help in a secondary way, or for a more "generic programming" job like tools programming. We generally only pay attention if you've done "cool stuff", usually written games in your own time or as class projects, or have experience at other gaming companies. Gaming degrees or gaming schools (DigiPen, Full Sail) will help, but only insofar as it provides you with an environment where you can easily make "cool stuff". We don't care about your gaming degree; we care about what you accomplished in class.

Now, one thing to point out is that there's not as much of an iron curtain in European companies. Based on anecdotal chats with some programmers from these companies, it seems much more common that they formerly worked in a "boring" industry.