Also you are more likely to break into the industry through your connections and networking than your portfolio, so important to strike a balance between the two. Work of quality certainly gains attention (depending on audience and trends), but the industry as a business has a lot of other factors that affect whether that…
Interestingly from what I've seen when I graduated, and quite consistently after, was that every game art student I know got into a studio through a recommendation. This isn't to say that they had no portfolio, or their work wasn't up to standard, but there was no real bar that that each seemed to have crossed, not to…