What a great blog you have! I'm interested that your path to a research position occurred via game development. Is that common? (I've subscribed to your feed, the combination of topics you cover is uncannily similar to my own interests.)
My "way in" was to just accept a generic offer and then later switch team to work inside Research (when you don't need to pass N layers of "recruiter abstraction" and can talk with colleagues and present your past work freely it becomes much easier). But still, among my collaborators maybe 5% don't have a PhD?
All of this was a surprise to me and made me question my life path and life choices. I'm originally from Poland in Eastern Europe and the only reason to consider a CS PhD would be if you wanted to teach. And I even considered it, but never occurred to me to do it for any kind of R&D work - mostly because of quality of Polish academic "research" being very low, much worse than the industry. And I am still in lots of self-doubt and questioning if I belong in this environment. Questions like "who was your advisor / what was your grad group?" when introducing yourself to new people become almost micro-aggressions. Also my focus on R&D ("solving unsolved problems") is very different than academic incentives ("use PhD interns to do projects, then write papers and get citations").