Amir Satvat is the undisputed game job champion. During the game industry’s worst job downturn in the past 2.5 years, about 35,000 game jobs have disappeared.
But Satvat, in his spare time, has helped create easily accessible resources to help people find game jobs. And nearly 3,500 people have found jobs through those resources. That’s amazing, and it’s why The Game Awards gave Satvat its first-ever Game Changers award back in December.
It’s been my honor to discover Satvat and write about his efforts to bring great transparency to finding jobs. Back when I wrote my first story on him, he was tracking jobs at 732 companies and had helped 450 people find work. Now, he’s tracking more than 3,000 companies and he is producing stats that no one else in the industry can do.
As an example, he predicted that hiring would exceed firing for the first time in January for the first time in about 30 months. He estimates there are 243,000 people directly employed in jobs. And he noted that someone over 50 has the same poor chances of getting a job in the game industry as someone who just graduated from college.
His information is so unique that I’ve cited it dozens of times in the in past year and a half. So it was my pleasure to moderate a fireside chat with him at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week. Many people in the crowd that watched us were able to get into the event because Satvat, who has accumulated a following of more than 120,000 people on LinkedIn, was able to get them tickets for free. We talked in a GDC 2025 session entitled, “Charting the Future: Layoffs, Recovery, Job Trends and Community Impact.”
Satvat’s selflessness is important to highlight. His day job is working in business development at Tencent, and he makes no money from this side effort for job seekers. It’s a good thing he’s a quant because compiling all of this data would take a normal person far more time. He has built a community of more than 10,000 people who volunteer to help with his work, like Project Reality, which is focused on finding jobs in adjacent industries for people who are trying to break into gaming.
And be sure to catch another panel with Satvat at our GamesBeat Summit 2025 event on May 19-20 in Los Angeles.
Here’s an edited transcript of our session.
GamesBeat: It’s been a tough two and a half years for the game industry. We’re very sorry about these numbers. Something like 35,000-plus layoffs in the last two and a half years in games. Amir Satvat will add a lot more color to that. I remember, back in 2017 or so, trying to do a story about how many jobs there were for games in the world and where they were. When I was doing that, I found some countries were excellent at tracking these numbers, like Canada and Finland. Anybody who had some incentives created to attract game jobs into their countries. The United States was so-so. But it gave people a picture of where they needed to be if they wanted to be where all the game jobs were.
What was interesting at that time, the world was flat in terms of games. It was no longer just Japan, North America, and Europe. There were places like Siberia, which had a couple of twin brothers making games because it was too cold for them to go outside. They built up a mobile game company and got 30 million downloads for one of their games. They had 100 people working for them in Siberia.
The world was flat. Games could be made anywhere. In some ways that was a preview of things to come in the industry. But there was no authoritative source of information that I could find. One of the best was the Game Dev Map by Guarav Mathur, a gaming artist. He had done a pretty good job over the years on his own, collecting information about where game studios were based, what cities they were in. He would continuously update this map. (It has companies, but not jobs listed).
Fast forward to 2022. We were looking at the layoffs that Facebook/Meta announced, which triggered a lot of tech layoffs. They did 30,000-plus layoffs all at once. We were looking around to see if there was anything I could use, something to refer people to jobs that were open. Someone led me to Amir Satvat. At that time he just had some spreadsheets. He hadn’t made them public yet. I’ll let him pick up the story from there.
Amir Satvat: Where all of that started is I wanted to do a proof of concept, having spent a lot of time working in data science, to see if I could do a bottoms-up mapping of what roles looked like. The reason this is important is because this generalized approach for a lot of the data we do for the community allows everything to happen – whether it’s jobs, the locations of companies, geographic mappings – in a way that I don’t believe one is able to do otherwise.
Even though the community started in November 2022, coming up on three years this fall, I started that June doing a test, which I started with just 50 companies. The way the data is compiled, for anyone who doesn’t know about the Game Jobs Workbook, I literally crawl every single company’s jobs page at an individual level, take all that data, put it into a big soup, and then reorganize it by functional category. Doing that across many, many sites is what eventually allowed us to map everything and get to–it’s varied between 3,000, 3,500, something like that. I believe that was the only way to have a full, comprehensive view of what’s going on, but also have other details that could then allow us to have other insights.
GamesBeat: The first story I wrote about Amir was back in August of 2023. By that time Amir had been tracking 732 companies, all pretty much done by hand. He had helped, at that point, 450 people find jobs through his collection of resources. What is it now?
Satvat: It’s at 3,400, and coming up on 3,500. But I’m also proud, beyond that number–I don’t even count it. I probably could tabulate if I wanted. But the tens of thousands of interviews behind that, and generally the support behind the community. What’s been neat is that it definitely hasn’t been linear. As things have gotten bigger, it’s helped, and as we’ll talk about a lot more–we’ve also encouraged people to look for jobs outside of games. That’s now becoming a larger avenue of placement for us in the community, given the realities of the industry.
GamesBeat: The great thing about what Amir has done here is he did this on his own time, and he did it for no money. The little rant that this brings out of me, though–he’s doing this in his spare time. Where is the rest of the industry? Transparency is much appreciated for people who need to figure out what to do next. When you’re out of a job, you want to know. What are the choices before me? What are the best decisions that I can make? Which part of the industry should I specialize in? There are answers to these questions. Even the question of where in the world are the game jobs–I’m pretty sure that both Epic Games and Unity know exactly where all of their seats are in the industry. But that is not published information. I’ve asked for it and never received it.
The industry could collectively do something together to help people find jobs better. That’s my rant. It’s something that ought to be done by someone other than a guy who doesn’t have a ton of spare time. What did you start with? How did this start coming together in some ways into a collection of resources?
Satvat: It’s very interesting. The story of how we built up the resource base is, in a way, kind of a learning as well for those looking for opportunities, about the range of things that one should do and one should look for. That also hasn’t been the same over time. It’s evolved since 2022. What I mean by that is, when the heavy layoffs started in 2022, so many of us, including myself, had no idea how tough it would be.
Every resource we have in the community, every single one, including the first one, the Games Jobs Workbook, came from direct suggestions from the community. It was one of these crawl-walk-run things. We couldn’t do much until we knew where all the jobs were. We did that first. Then, because it’s important to know where jobs are and look for listings–as I always tell people, although sometimes people listen to me and sometimes don’t–I didn’t listen to that advice when people told me. It’s not just applying to the top 10 companies, top 50 companies, but applying to everything, especially the bottom half. Often, frankly, hiring managers and recruiters begged me to get more applications at that portion of the companies, which is interesting. But then having help for people.
The second piece is we started building up community coaching. I believe we also have a dearth of opportunities for people to coach in a scalable way. We started with 50 companies for the Games Jobs Workbook. We started with 10 community coaches that were giving services for mentorship. Then we added a community CV and LinkedIn review. We added mock interviews. We added art portfolio reviews. That was all–originally I would just post it on LinkedIn. Now it’s on the site. We have 2,300 coaches who’ve given 65,000 free conversations worth millions of estimable dollars. Now we’ve even added our own specific services on Discord, to offer people coaching over there.
After we added all of that, I thought about what other things we should have. We started doing posts for companies when people had layoffs. This is important because often companies, particularly smaller ones, feel like they don’t have outlets to someone who can link everybody in their organization who’s been affected. Many of you are here because of the tickets we’ve given away. We’ve given away 1,400-plus of those. I could go on. But the 15 resources we have reflect the community’s needs and how that’s evolved.
As we get to 2025, we can’t provide the same services and help to people. Providing CV advice, providing jobs and listings to people–many people have now been looking at that stuff, in many cases from our community, for three years. Putting that back in people’s faces is not only not helpful, but it maybe feels a bit patronizing. The latest thrust, which we can talk about a bunch more if you like–as many of you in the community know, we call it Project Reality. This year I’ve come to a strong point of view that, based on the stats that we have, if you look at everybody who looks for games work, I believe, and I believe our community–we have the highest quality and widest breadth of data on games employment of probably anyone in the world. Of all applicants, over 12 months, people only have about a 15% chance of finding a job in games. That number is about 5% if you have less than three years of experience or have never worked in games before. It’s 30% if you’re a veteran. There’s a reverse U-shaped curve, where if you get to age 50 or older, those numbers come back down to 5%.
I spent a lot of time, for the first two years, with the help of so many of you in this room, focusing on whatever number you like, whether it’s 5% or 15% or 30%. Now I believe we need to all turn the page, because everyone spent so much disproportionate effort just targeting how to help people find a job in games. We have 25 volunteers, led by an EP who also volunteered from the community for Project Reality, which is a resource of resources entirely focused on helping people find jobs outside games, because that’s where we know 85% of people are going to have to go to feed their families. Not forever, not giving up the dream, but in the short term.
GamesBeat: This has grown into a huge resource. How quickly did you start thinking of this as your own community? On LinkedIn–I think that was the place where your following grew the fastest. If you grow on LinkedIn, it means something different than if you’re growing on Twitter or YouTube. You’re getting people who are willing to give you their real names. But when did it start feeling like a community for you?
Satvat: The reason it worked out that way, and the reason that, really pragmatically, I use my own name as branding–it’s not because of personal aggrandizement of any sort. If I could just call it Generic Games Community and I thought that would be most effective, I would have done that. But given the setting of LinkedIn, I made that decision because I believe, other than doing everything for free, the real secret weapon, I realized, was going to be enlisting a large number of other people, in a variety of ways. Enlisting the people who actually have the ability to pay it forward, who could help vocalize and get more people in the system. But it was also about the network that has been built up, which is much easier on LinkedIn.
We now have a huge number of hiring managers and recruiters who partner with our network on all kinds of things. We have thousands of people–that resource that we have where people list themselves to be found for work and other things, they look at that. People now know that when cuts are coming, they can reach out to me before that happens so we can partner. It all just seemed a logical fit. And then because of my friend Justin Williams, who first encouraged it, and many of our moderators who are here from Discord today, it organically started to make sense to grow more broadly to a site and other resources. When we were ready, more people could take advantage of it.
GamesBeat: Here’s where we’re getting a bit more practical. How should someone look for a job now, given the resources you have?
Satvat: The way to look for a job, and the questions you should ask yourself about getting a job, have changed. It’s about doing a lot of different things at the same time. I still believe, as the 100 level–we’re certainly not the only ones who have job listings. There’s a number of other great communities providing these services. But everyone should, one, be aware, apply, and regularly look at all games jobs, but across all companies. Again, not the top 10.
“No problem. I’m already looking at everything across the 3,000 companies you list. I’m making a best faith effort to look at those.” Many people are. Two, I believe that–we’ve added another resource, and we’ll broaden this with Project Reality. We have a listing that has games and tech jobs. The next thing people should do is–certainly our mentors can help this, but we will build this out in a more scalable way, I hope very soon in the coming months. It’s a very good exercise to go through whatever the function and area of work is that you’re doing and look for adjacent verticals, many of which may not be immediately obvious.
Certainly through my own life story, which some of you know, because I talk about it a bit, because I think people find it helpful–I didn’t find my job in games until 38. Mostly because of location preference that was very important to me. What I always say is, how many steps do you have to make a hiring manager or recruiter walk across to give you a job? My conclusion was that if I worked in BD and strategy and the only thing I didn’t have was the vertical, now all I had to convince them was about games. I had the experience that could work.
There are a lot of ways to get experience. I see a lot of people here who are entry-level candidates, or who are just out of college, who might be looking for work. One thing that has changed–I had a lightbulb moment. I have a very good friend at work, who back in the day used to work with Next Gen magazine. We were at DICE once. A bunch of his friends came up, who are now all big cheese people at various companies. All these people worked at Next Gen. Once upon a time you had people doing those magazine rounds. There were more opportunities for going through QA to production. Even people who worked in retail found opportunities. A lot of those things, in fact probably all of them, don’t exist anymore. The question is, what is in place of them?
I’ve concluded, and I’m not saying any of these things are easy–they’re not easy. But I think of a friend of many of us in this room, Ayla Derrick, who works at Cave Bear Games. I hold her and many others up as an example. She has a studio of people, all or most of whom are looking for work. The point of that is to get any experience. I always tell people that no one will discover you at random or by accident. Their project is about making a game. It’s not going to be a best-selling game. But it’s about having a finished product, and having a very visible presence on social media, putting themselves out there.
One last piece of that I’ll mention, because I think it’s very important–networking is such a turn-off word. It makes me go to sleep too. But it’s about meeting and socializing with people in the right way. I’ve been telling everyone this story that happened yesterday. I was in the Marriott at about 9:30. I just wanted to go back to my room and play Balatro. And then a cavalcade of random heavy-duty games veteran people just started coming in. They just came and sat down. The level of seriousness of what was discussed between these people who were all VP-plus levels at companies probably did not go above talking about Mario Kart. But that was an interaction opportunity.
People think being with senior people is about asking for a job in some type of transactional way, a serious conversation about their life goals or CV. I believe that it’s just about being in the presence of people at organizations in industries you want to work in and having very pleasant human conversations with them. That’s why we do so much with tickets. That’s why we encourage people to go to events. I could go on, but my point is, these are a lot of different things, and you do all of them at the same time, all the time, even if you’re not working in games. Even if you’re working at Deloitte and Touche, you’re doing this all the time to try to find a games job. Not in one year, not in three years, but maybe even in five years down the road. Not giving up.
GamesBeat: I think of different kinds of job-seekers. There are ones that are more passive, that allow things to happen to them. I’ve been at VentureBeat 17 years because I just haven’t looked for other jobs. But there are also very active job-seekers. Can you distinguish some of that? I do recall getting out of school and starting to look for newspaper jobs. There was a pretty thick book that had names and addresses of people in the industry, recruiters and things like that. I went through it and sent out 100 applications fairly quickly. I wound up getting a job in Dallas where I knew some people because of some summer internship training programs I went through, so it was a personal connection that got me in the door. But I also had friends who maybe sent out 10 applications.
If they had known–I remember when you told me this number. A recent college grad has a 1% chance of finding a job in their first year in games. If they had known that, they probably would have sent out more than 10 applications. That person, I remember, said that they didn’t like rejection. It was a very strange self-fulfilling doom that they’d created for themselves. So is there a difference in the types of job-seekers you see?
Satvat: This reminds me of–my wife is 100 times smarter than me. She’s amazing. But she’s an economist. She often shares these interesting studies with me. One of these was–someone looked at applications to college in the United States. People often look at how eye-popping the numbers have become for admissions to college. But when they started controlling for all other factors – grade level, extracurriculars and so on – a lot of people just applied to a lot more stuff. They found that when you adjust for all that stuff, the odds for highly qualified applicants actually haven’t changed that much over time. The numbers just look worse than they are.
I would make a similar statement, in a way, about games. This is important to say. It’s hard to say exactly, because getting data looking back before 2020 is pretty hard. But games have always been an industry that is very difficult to find a job in. It’s a vocational industry. My estimates are that at any given point in time, there’s somewhere between 10,000 to 15,000 roles open in the entire games industry. If you add to that the fact that there’s turnover and people opening new roles and so forth, there’s probably 15,000 to 20,000 roles in the games industry that turn over and are hired every year. If you take all entry-level roles for three-year people and younger, there’s probably 1,000 to 1,500 of those roles, of which 200 to 400 of those numbers come down as internships.
The first point I have to stipulate is just that it’s really hard. Unfortunately, it’s really hard. Every single person who wants a games job just out of college, entry-level, whatever, they’re fighting for the same 1,000 to 1,500 roles across every functional group you can imagine.
Now, to directly answer your question, I feel like people put a huge amount of worry into thinking about their CV, about their cover letter, about how many roles they’re applying to, about so many things. I have two responses to this that are both data-based. One is that I believe it comes down to two things: connections and location. Let me explain what I mean by that. Depending on what cohort you’re in, I believe you can be as much as 20 times more likely to get a job if you have any connection whatsoever to someone who’s a hiring manager on the recruiting team.
I’m going to say something a bit provocative, because I promised straight talk and you guys paid a lot of money to be here. I basically believe the cold application is a complete waste of time. If you don’t have a connection to someone for a role in some capacity, applying to 10 roles versus 50 roles versus 100 roles basically doesn’t make a difference. You’re much better off putting every bit of effort you have into establishing some type of connection with an organization or firm and making about 10 high-quality applications. Even if it feels better doing 50 applications, statistically it’s not the same.
The second thing I want to say–another thing I’ve developed a strong point of view on–one question that Dean asked me is, where are the jobs in the games industry located? This is very difficult, but as I mentioned, because of the way we did the Games Jobs Workbook, I could map at an individual level, for every single job, where it is by city and town in the world.
Let’s take North America. In North America 75% of the jobs that exist in terms of open roles are in five states or regions: California, Washington state, Vancouver, Montreal, and North Carolina. Texas is sixth because of Austin. When I started tracking this stuff in 2022, 25% of game roles were remote. I redid this data in March. That number is down to about 10%. If I just quoted you that figure of 15% for overall odds, and you don’t live in one of those five places, your odds are maybe like 2% instead of 15%.
If my first advice is that it’s all about building relationships to have higher quality applications, being an active applicant in that way, my other point is that now, and more so over time, one’s willingness – which I also know is not really fair thing – one’s willingness to move is going to be a major determinant. I know that can suck. I have many friends, we all do, who moved to San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles, moved to the east coast, and 12 months later they lost their job. It really sucks. It costs a lot. But this is not only true in the United States. It’s going to start to become, I believe, more true on an international level.
As best as I can tell, prior to 2022, if you take North America, Europe, and Asia, we always had the biggest number of open roles in North America. Europe and Asia fought it out for two and three. Now Asia has the most roles, EMEA is number two, and North America is number three. When you couple that with the fact that 75% of the layoffs in 2024 were in North America, and 53% were in California alone, I believe it’s very underappreciated that one’s ability to be global is going to become perhaps the most important determinant, after networking and access, to whether one can find a role.
GamesBeat: If you look at what just happened with Netease, they’ve decided to either shutter or lay off a lot of people in western game studios. They set those up because they wanted to become known as a triple-A game publisher. They were starting to succeed. They had Marvel Rivals come out and draw 25 million players right off the bat in December. Black Myth: Wukong came along as well, though, and showed that Chinese game developers, maybe for the first time, were able to make a triple-A game. It was based on local mythology, but it turned out to have appeal on a global stage as well.
Their conclusion from that was to invest more in Chinese teams. It made sense, because those teams were much less expensive. You have an example of a very big company making decisions that affect their workforce that are geographically driven. These are rational decisions for a company to make. If you multiply that across 3,000 companies in the industry, you can see, as Amir pointed out, that the recovery of jobs–it’s been uneven. Asia is growing faster than North America in terms of jobs. Can you talk about some of that recovery?
Satvat: If we look across the cost of labor, just to add a little detail, the average cost per developer head in North America is $150,000 to $160,000. In eastern Europe that cost is $60,000. In China it’s about $50,000. When you have discrepancies of that type, eventually that will cause some things to change and some things to happen.
The other thing I would say about recovery–one thing that many of you may see when I post on LinkedIn is that all this data that I’ve been talking about that flows through everything, I put it through a huge macroeconomic model that I created. It projects the supply and demand that’s going on in the games industry. Again, it’s different from my viewpoint, because I have the luxury of viewing it from a global standpoint versus what one might see being in one particular place. One thing is projecting the number of layoffs. To give a bit of confidence in what I’m about to say, last year at around the fourth of July, I started producing this forecast for what I thought the number of layoffs would be in the back half of last year. The initial forecast ended up being about %98.5 accurate to where layoffs ended up. I don’t expect that level of accuracy most of the time, but my point is, I think the system is working.
A lot of people asked me to make a similar projection for this year. I said, “It’s going to have inaccuracies if you start in January, but I’ll do my best.” The projection that I had for this year when I started in the beginning of the year is that there would be 10,000 layoffs, which is not as bad as last year. That was godawful. But something more like 2023. There’s still going to be a lot of pain that will be terrible and we’re going to do as much we can to help, but I’m clear-eyed about that.
With that said, you might remember that earlier I mentioned that one of the things I track is how many roles turn over for the industry. If I think about those 10,000-15,000 roles that are open, and the fact that 15,000-20,000 turn over total, it’s like filling a hole. If we have 10,000 layoffs, but we hire 15,000 people, we’re filling the hole. Filling that entire hole of 35,000 jobs is going to take a long time, but we’re filling the hole. This is why, when people ask me what is the break-even, it depends on how you want to define it. If the definition of break-even, which is my definition, is that over a trailing two months basis it’s net hiring exceeding net layoffs, I believe we hit that in Q1 of this year.
But all of this depends on where you’re sitting. I can say this from a global standpoint. Someone in Los Angeles might come to me and say, “What are you talking about?” That’s where half of the cuts were last year. Increasingly, one thing to be cognizant about is what frame you’re talking about in terms of recovery from a geographic perspective.
GamesBeat: There’s a notion that government can do something about this. In France it’s very difficult to lay off people. When Ubisoft had a round of cuts recently–they’re often criticized for having maybe the worst ratio of revenues or profits or market cap per employee. They have too many people. But a lot of those people are in France. It’s difficult to lay them off. When they did do layoffs this year, they happened in relatively high-cost areas where that kind of protection wasn’t there: San Francisco, other cities in the United States, and Singapore. When you think about where some of the impact is going to be, all of these things come into account.
Satvat: Maybe I’ll take the discussion into a bit of a different direction. What’s changing, what’s staying the same, and what does recovery look like? What you’re getting at, which is unfortunately a reality–it’s more likely than not, given cost levels, that cuts are going to be in the west rather than the east. It’s also more likely than not that cuts will happen at larger triple-As rather than smaller companies. But I still maintain, and perhaps it is foolish of me to think so, an optimism that we can get back to the levels we were at if we handle things properly. This is because of real things I see happening.
The studios and locations that are disproportionately having those cuts need to think more like the places that are not. It’s possible that the resting size of the industry may end up being a bit smaller than it is now, but the bigger challenge–if I was asked about the big thing you want to tackle first–a lot of people have been talking about this at GDC. It’s how the large studios with the heavy costs go from the A to B of having more agile, low-cost, nimble studios that can produce stuff.
In the interim that will have some pain, but maybe that’s what you’re getting at. Being able to walk that path is going to be an essential part of it if we want to have any hope of getting to something that looks like breaking even sometime.
GamesBeat: Government actions can make a difference here. The structure of laws, whether there are unions present or not. There are things that countries can do. Specialization in some ways. Finland specialized in mobile games for decades. Eventually we got Supercell out of that. After that we had Turkey and match-three games, which created a massive industry and a bunch of jobs. There are strategies that different regions can pursue to make themselves more competitive. A big part of why there are more game jobs in Los Angeles than San Francisco now is esports. For a while esports was driving a lot of growth, so it made sense to put those jobs in Los Angeles. There’s Hollywood and games as well. Different things make sense on the level of regional strategy. It can also come down to the individual. If you’re someone who is very knowledgeable about movies, TV, and games, that’s what is selling now.
Satvat: The data supports the fact that industry groups and clusters help with employment. We see this in many settings. There’s Poland. One that’s close to my heart because of working with PlaySide is Australia and New Zealand. I’d also say, speaking for myself, I’m supportive of labor protections and unions. But the one thing I would say – not from my perspective, but from that of my 100-times-smarter wife the economist – is that the danger is thinking of those things as a panacea, which they’re not. As part of an overall suite of protections that help, I believe in them.
GamesBeat: I’m a business writer. I’ve been at a business-to-business publication for years. I quite often interview CEOs in the industry. I’ve interviewed them when they’re small and when they’ve become much bigger companies. But getting the data that comes in from you tells me that what’s good for the industry is not necessarily to just continuously grow revenue. That’s great and that’s necessary, but the industry would be better off embracing new technologies as well, technologies that come along and deliver something great for players. Growing the jobs base along with those other things is equally important. If you can do that, you’re improving the lot of the people in the industry who are so necessary to providing that revenue.
Satvat: I think of an old anecdote. In 1992, Sierra On-Line made the game King’s Quest V. They sold 400,000 units at $50. They made $20 million in revenue. That was enough for Ken Williams to throw a party, as I understand, and to start planning for King’s Quest VI. The reason I mention this is one thing we’ve gotten away from–you could disagree with me, but games started as an art form. First and foremost games were an art form, and there was a sensibility about what level of profitability was sufficient. In some ways we’ve gotten away from that. I don’t like using words like “better” or “worse.” It’s different. But as you have professional managers, MBAs, venture capital firms, lots of people coming into the industry who aren’t gamers themselves, that view has changed.
Again, if I wanted to be a bit provocative, I could argue that this has cut both ways. The firms that have tried to be the most profit-maximizing are also the ones on the other end that experience the largest number of cuts. A piece of this to think about is having some sense of right-sizing. What is sufficient? How far can you push a product? How much revenue can you extract from a game? I think about this all the time. When did we go from 400,000 copies of King’s Quest V and having a party to $3 billion in revenue leading to disappointment and it’s time to lay off staff? I don’t think about good and bad, but it’s different. We should think about this.
GamesBeat: Back to that plea for transparency in the industry, the industry is very good about rallying behind causes. When the Los Angeles fires happened we saw a lot of companies come out and donate money to people who had just lost their homes. There was a lot of attention paid to DEI programs in the industry in the wake of Black Lives Matter. But there’s another catastrophe that’s happened to the industry in the last two and a half years. I don’t see the industry, or companies in particular, stepping up to do something about it, to protect their own in the way that they have when there’s a more obvious crisis.
The industry needs to be more transparent. It needs to act to do something about this state of things. They’re making it seem so unattractive to work in this industry compared to many others.
Satvat: It’s very slow, but certainly with what time I can find, I try to advocate with leaders and executives across a number of fronts. One, to be honest with you, it’s just talking about empathy. I know that doesn’t put a job on someone’s plate, and I also understand all the reasons that organizations can’t show empathy. Legal, liability, the things they can say and the things they can’t. But if the 100 level, which I talk about with them all the time, is that you can and should show more empathy, the 200 level is often just trying to share the stuff that our community is doing.
In so many cases, I’ve found a lot of people who want to help, but sincerely they’re just not sure what to do. In fact, about that Project Reality I mentioned, when we actually get that together one thing I want to do is I want to push hard that–I have a sense of what that suite of support might look like. Just one example. Companies can do a much better job, even if it’s not in games, of offering some of that support that I talked about around helping people understand what other things they can look for, what things they might be qualified for.
The reason I say this–I can’t even tell you how many conversations I’ve had with people who’ve been laid off. It’s heartbreaking to hear thousands of those conversations. But a huge level of it is very primal. I’ll meet a game designer who’s been a game designer for 15 years. They’re not even thinking step 200 or 300 yet. They’ve never done anything in their career besides game design, sometimes only at company X. What do they even do? “Didn’t anybody at their company help you with anything?” “No.” If you’re fortunate there is a very conscientious talent or HR person who is helping, particularly at a bigger company, although at some smaller ones as well. But in my experience, that support is pretty uneven. We could talk about the riches of even deeper support, but I would love to start with even basic stuff like empathy and job help around what people need to do. We’re not doing that on a consistent basis.
GamesBeat: Duolingo is here recruiting for jobs. You wouldn’t think of them as a game company, but they have gamification going on in a very big way inside Duolingo. They know that if you’re learning languages, the second you drop out, you never come back. Engagement is what they’re after, and the people who know how to do engagement are game developers. They’re here hiring game developers to do gamified applications that aren’t really games. They’re doing language learning apps, but it’s an adjacent industry that’s smart enough to be here to tell people they have open jobs.
For all the people who are interested in the metaverse, it seems limited here to Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite. The larger dreams of the metaverse have maybe dissipated. Meta hasn’t helped in that way. But digital twins in enterprise are exploding. Fifty miles south of here is Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose. They’re talking about all the growth of enterprise digital twins that are made with game engines. They’re also talking about physical AI, robots. Robots are taking over the world right now. There are opportunities in adjacent industries if you think of the line connecting games and other industries. That’s important.
Satvat: That’s a huge part of the solution. We’re going to try to make this with the resource I keep mentioning, which I promise we’re working on. Some adjacencies are easier. For someone like me who works in BD or finance, it doesn’t matter if you work in aerospace or in games. It helps to have a lot of industry knowledge. That makes it easier. But if you’re a game designer or someone in narrative, it can be a lot harder to know what those adjacencies are. Step one is identifying those adjacencies. The next level after that would be helping people identify those roles and get them.
Another thing to note is that everything is hard right now. It’s not just games. We’ve spent this whole time talking about games, but I have a brother in law who did color correction for film. He went to a great school. He’s been out of work for eight months. I have another brother in law who’s a writer. He was writing for Rolling Stone. He’s now at Billboard. He’s employed, but the specter of losing that job for a hundred different reasons there. I have tens of thousands of friends in tech who are looking for roles. I’m not saying this to be depressing, but we should also be aware that a lot of these things are general challenges everyone is facing. Another source of support that I’ve found is talking to peers in other industries to see the strategies that have helped them.
Question: For people who are less experienced in the industry, making lateral shifts, or early in their careers, how might we be able to support and sustain the community? Are there opportunities that you would see at ways we can volunteer, interact, and help support your community and your spaces?
Satvat: Absolutely. There are so many different opportunities. I’ll give you just a few. First off, our Discord community is very active. There are so many opportunities to help there. We have a lot of informal channels where people are giving each other support. I certainly think anyone can contribute there. In fact, we’ve had people who’ve done that for a while. We see them helping others and we say, “That’s great. Why don’t we add you as a community coach?” That’s one opportunity.
The second one is honestly just participating in content within LinkedIn. I try to post, when I can, two to three times a day, which I know is a little bit crazy. It’s lighter now because we’re at GDC. But I seriously believe that those comments help. I can’t tell you how many times people post about their jobs, and not even on my posts, but just going on LinkedIn for other people who are looking for jobs–people have told me that just having someone give advice or an encouraging word means a lot. That’s very valuable.
The third thing I would say–as I mentioned, every single resource we have, and in fact micro-changes we’ve made to the community, all come from feedback in the community. Keeping an eye on all of that–I have an SLA of responding to every note I get across all platforms within 48 hours if I can. If you send me comments and suggestions, I really appreciate it, and I promise you it doesn’t go into a bin. It goes to me. I take it very seriously. There are many opportunities, and I’m always happy to talk about it more, but those are just three ideas.
Question: There’s been a lot of confusion surrounding this epidemic of layoffs. There are some things I can point to that I think might have caused it. Divestment is one thing you mentioned. There’s scaling up and scaling down in the wake of the pandemic. But none of that seems to explain it in its entirety. What insights do you have regarding the origination of all this?
Satvat: We could have a long discussion just on that. The easy answer, and a lazy one to your point, is the COVID one. The second point is companies have very high costs that have come about in development, and a lot of times games–Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. You can deliver a game like that on $50-80 million costs. If that game now costs $200-400 million, it’s much harder. You have high cost binary games, where if the game doesn’t hit, it means dire circumstances for the company.
GamesBeat: Matthew Ball had 224 slides on all the different things he could think of that could possibly explain why things have turned out this way. He points to 15 current challenges, eight things that didn’t work out so well, and 10 things that drove the industry for a decade, but no longer.
Satvat: The other thing is intense competition for demand. The competition for games isn’t just other games. It’s YouTube. It’s TikTok. People increasingly want social experiences that are often shorter in scope. You have closed systems like Roblox and Fortnite that hold people in. You have live service games that often hold people in and don’t allow for other opportunities. The total amount of consumption among people for games–my wife calls people unlike us in this room “civilians.” For civilians who aren’t ultra games people like us, at maximum peak they might buy five to eight games a year. There are definitely some factors around demand and supply, but there are so many games as well. When you have tens of thousands of games coming out every year, it’s difficult for all of them to be consumed. Those are some ideas.
Question: We’ve gotten a lot of sad statistics during the session. What’s a positive piece of data or statistic that you see about the industry going into the future?
GamesBeat: Amir’s notion that hiring is finally starting to exceed firing for the first time in 30 months is positive. That notion of “survive to ‘25” wasn’t a total lie.
Satvat: The hiring/layoff thing is a good one. One thing I’d also add is that the stuff I’m talking about, being able to make right-size games that are profitable, it’s not hypothetical. My day job, I’m proud to work at Tencent in BD and try to do that in a very compassionate way. A big part of that is trying to support a lot of developers, even if they’re developers that I know may not be a size fit for Tencent. I see a lot of them doing a dynamite job, making profit, and they haven’t laid people off. They’re doing stuff.
I would add within that, a big bogey thing we talk about is AI. I know AI is very scary, but I’ve seen a number of examples this week, which is very encouraging, about companies that are using AI in a conscientious and responsible way to augment capability rather than cutting people on their teams. Those are some things I feel positive about.
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