How to Be Strategic About Your Career in Games

push to talk #4 // feat. an essay on layoffs in game dev and what comes next

The layoffs this week, particularly those at Riot Games, hit close to home. Extremely talented friends—people I worked alongside for years—lost their jobs. 

So for this week's post, I wanted to write something that goes beyond the typical post-layoff advice you see on LinkedIn. My hope is this might be helpful for anyone in the games industry who's worried about the year ahead. It's time for real talk about what 2024 looks like for all of us, and what we can do to prepare. 

Find that below the fold. But first, this week's industry news rundown.

Scuttlebutt and Slackery

The week’s most-shared, oft-Slacked, and spiciest games industry news links.

• 1,900 Xbox/ATVI layoffs, 530 at Riot Games - Microsoft said in an “internal” memo that their layoffs mostly targeted newly acquired Activision-Blizzard employees, though I’ve seen posts confirming scattered layoffs at other Xbox subsidiaries. Riot Games posted both a message aimed at the public as well as a message for Rioters which detailed a respectable comp package for those affected. Lots to say about all this—see the essay below.

• Palworld broke records, and brains - Palworld became the #2 highest-CCU game of all-time on Steam, and along the way was accused of violating Nintendo’s IP rights (debatable, according to lawyers), using A.I. generated art (no evidence of this so far), and ripping 3D models from other games (eh… maybe?). My marketing-brained take on this is that “Pokémon with guns” is unironically G.O.A.T. positioning for a game, and Palworld actually delivers on the premise in unexpected and entertaining ways. Also, the CEO of Pocketpair keeps giving out hilarious interviews. If you want a more detailed analysis, these guys have you covered.

• Asmongold kicks the hornets nest - One theme running through all of the Palworld controversy has been game artists feeling that their work and opinions are being devalued, both by gamers and the industry as a whole. These suspicions were seemingly confirmed by a turbo-viral hot take from popular streamer Asmongold. Reactions have been intense, and Asmon has since doubled down in a very long video followup.

• The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024 - On Tuesday Matthew Ball casually dropped a 15,000-word essay about the state of the games industry that features some genuinely incredible statistics. One ominous passage: “Overall venture funding in North America is down 51% from 2021 highs, but still up 15% from the 2018-2019 average. In contrast, gaming has contracted 77% from the high and is down 28% net from 2018-2019 average. And while overall venture funding has stabilized, gaming is still contracting. The result is clear and unavoidable: there will be many, many gaming start-up closures over the next two years.”

• IGN’s reviews editors do a Reddit AMA - For as long as I’ve remembered, the relationship between the games industry’s biggest endemic media outlet and its most engaged (or maybe just most enraged) readers has tended to feel pretty hostile. So it was really nice to see IGN’s reviews editors wade into the chaos of a Reddit AMA thread and emerge no worse for wear. The questions were interesting, the tone respectful, and the responses thoughtful. Who’d have thought?

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How to Be Strategic About Your Career in Games

Source: Civilization VI

My goal with this newsletter is fundamentally an optimistic one: I want to highlight cool people doing interesting work in and around games. But it would be ridiculous, as the industry is going through one of the most brutal contractions in its history, to ignore all the bad and focus exclusively on the good. 

So, in that spirit, let's take a second for an honest appraisal of the state of the industry at this moment.

Last year was a record-breaking one for games industry layoffs (between 6,500-10,000 depending on where you locate the blurry line between tech layoffs and games layoffs), and unless there's a massive shift in the trend set by this January's >5,800 job cuts, 2024 looks to be meaningfully worse.

As Bloody January comes to a close, we're forced to come to a few conclusions:

No one is immune. Plenty of extremely talented, widely respected, well-connected people get laid off. It's not something you can ever fully protect yourself from, and will probably happen to all of us at least once over the course of our careers. 

The timing is horrendous. This is, without question, the worst time to be laid off in the recent history of the industry. Multiple people who are still out of work since last year's layoffs have told me how devastating it is to realize that with every new wave of layoffs at Unity, or Discord, or Riot, or so-on, the ratio of job-seekers to open jobs gets more and more dire. 

Investor funds have dried up, so starting a game studio with the intention of getting investment backing is harder than ever.

It's not getting better soon. Most industry analysts and leaders that I talk to believe the industry will continue shrinking throughout this year. The most optimistic person I've spoken to, a director-level marketer at a large studio, told me that "things will get better whenever Jerome Powell says they can get better," maybe as soon as the middle of this year. But more pessimistic voices argue that real recovery might not kick in until 2026.

Increasingly, those of us lucky enough to still have jobs in the games industry are at a loss for ways to help our friends who've lost one. We send private messages, try to set up calls, and lend an ear or a shoulder. But we all know that many of these jobs are not coming back, at least not soon. So it's natural to wonder what we can actually do to help, or even what we'd do if, at some point this year or next, the grim reaper comes for us.

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The Real Impacts, and Possible Mitigations

For those laid off, some percentage will ultimately leave games altogether, either for a few years or permanently. If you're just looking to get back into games quickly, the obvious advice includes tapping into personal networks and—depending on your financial situation—considering lateral moves or even roles that are a step-down from your current one.

Going indie, particularly given all the tools available, is a real option, although scaling a studio or making hires will be tough given the aforementioned funding shortage. But it may also be time to consider roles at non-gaming jobs, particularly ones where you can learn and grind out experience that'll serve you well if you ever want to come back to games when times are less lean.

For junior candidates or people new to the industry, you're up against long odds. I'm already seeing a circling-of-wagons happening with networks specifically aimed at supporting those who've been laid off—a good thing, in my view, as those of us in the industry should take care of our own. The net effect, though, is that any role that opens up is going to be immediately slammed with well-credentialed, well-connected applicants. That means junior applicants and fresh grads are going to have a rough time getting in. 

My advice for junior candidates is always the same: you must be able to show recruiters how you've completed projects and delivered results that are relevant to the job you're applying to. For a writer, show me your clips. For a budding designer, liking games isn't enough—making a game is the new bar. You have to differentiate yourself from all the other junior applicants by showing that you can ship tangible, original work.

And for anyone currently with a job in the games industry, your first order of business needs to be finding ways to help those affected. I see so many people doing this already in public venues online, and I know more is happening behind the scenes. 

One thing to consider doing if you haven't already is to go beyond offering referrals and coffee meetups: Depending on your skillset, apply your abilities and do some serious work for your friends for free. Offer help with resumes, personal portfolio websites, logo designs, or whatever else they might need. Hell, send them a DoorDash giftcard, just do something.

After that, it's completely appropriate to take a minute and think about yourself as well. The layoffs aren't slowing down, which is cause enough for anxiety and dread on top of the survivor's guilt that a lot of people are feeling.

You can't control the layoffs, but you can control how you prepare yourself for your next opportunities, and position yourself to weather the future. So the mitigation I want to suggest here is one that could come off as selfish, but which is actually just good career hygiene: taking some time to reflect and think about your career strategy.

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On Career Strategy and Layoff Resiliency

Simply defined, a career strategy is a system for navigating work over time: what jobs you take, what promotions or opportunities you go for, and even how you build relationships and work with others on a day-to-day basis.

Career strategy is a neglected topic. Over the last decade, as I managed teams at studios like Riot Games, Respawn, PUBG Corp (now KRAFTON), and Odyssey, I've noticed that many people default to thinking that if they just focus on doing great work on things they're passionate about, everything else will fall into place. 

Even in boom times, this approach can backfire. People who work hard often get passed over for promotions, or get stuck in a role because they're only focused on doing great work that matches that particular role's parameters.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If you adopt a well-considered career strategy, you can build up advantages that unlock doors for you later down the road and help you to recover more quickly if you’re ever laid off. Think of these accumulated advantages as "layoff resiliency."

To my mind, there are a five main factors that can make someone more layoff resilient. In no particular order, these are:

1) Flexible Positions With Lots of Open Moves

In Chess, one of the first pieces of strategic advice you learn is to develop pieces to squares where they'll have more available moves. A knight stuck in a corner can only move to one or two squares, but one in the center of the board can attack up to eight squares at once, which occasionally opens up amazing attacking opportunities. The power of making moves that increase your available options applies to careers as well. 

The King has nowhere to move, so that well-developed knight in the center of the board was able to win the game in a single jump—the importance of space.

If you are a Senior Director of PR at a healthcare company, you might be getting paid well, but your options are actually somewhat limited… mostly to PR jobs in the healthcare sector. You could maybe move up to a VP of PR role, or a head comms job at another healthcare co, but switching outside of PR will be much harder unless you're willing to take a heavy paycut.

At the other end of the payscale, junior people can find themselves stuck in a place where they’re permanently perceived as the freshfaced noob. This is the equivalent of getting stuck into a corner.

Some roles are inherently more flexible, but one way to mitigate the risks of working in an inflexible role is by picking up side projects within your company that fall outside your typical focus area. E.g. if you're a copywriter, doing some community or comms work. Or, for a systems designer, shadowing a producer and learning the tricks of the trade. The point is to open up more space on the gameboard for your next move.

2) Strong personal networks

By this, I don't just mean knowing lots of people throughout the industry. I mean having relationships based on mutual respect, particularly with senior people, across a wide variety of disciplines. This is something that you cannot do overnight, and the benefits only really start to compound dramatically after 5-to-10 years in the industry. 

Some ways to accelerate this process (beyond the typical advice like being great to work with and reaching out to people proactively) are by working in a role that puts you in touch with lots of people across a company. In years past, job-hopping every few years was also a surprisingly viable way to build a wide-ranging network, but in the current meta I consider this strategy to be heavily nerfed.

3) A reputation for cutting-edge work

Not just "really great" work, but work that makes others in the industry want to steal your ideas. Reputations are built on a combination of perception and reality—you have to do great work that gets recognized. This one connects directly to the "strong network" point above, because one of the best ways to build a strong network is by contributing in ways that make other people proud to work with you. Admittedly, this can be very difficult to achieve at the junior level, unless you're at a small company.

The benefits of finding a job that allows you to work on the cutting-edge are manifold: your job satisfaction is likely to be higher overall and you'll be less likely to burn out as well. If you feel like you're only able to do mid-tier work in your current role, you've got to find a way to either level up or break out, whether by learning from someone more experienced or finding a way to pivot into work where you can actually shine.

4) Experience in high-demand or high-growth areas

This one sucks to talk about, but it's true: Entire classes of jobs are impacted differently by layoffs depending on how game industry leadership perceives their relative importance to the company's bottom line. To use concrete recent examples, I'd say this one is harder for esports or QA people right now, and easier for monetization managers or gameplay engineers. This is not to say that these roles are actually more or less valuable—it simply means that people in these roles should focus on improving their layoff resiliency in other ways. 

The sweet spot is a "high-demand role" for which there are relatively few qualified people available. One way to unlock that is by focusing on a rare sub-specialization that your company needs, in addition to your standard skillset.

5) A level-headed approach to work communication

The ability to just stay cool in your comms—not going on tilt, blowing up Slack channels with hot takes, or escalating conflicts—is a surprisingly rare skill in games. We all probably know good people who lost a job for tweeting something out-of-pocket, but less visible mistakes get made on internal company channels every day. 

In my view, it's not enough to just "stay professional," when often what's needed is an approach to office comms that actively builds trust between people by solving conflicts and creating understanding and respect.

I should probably write more about this at some point, but a few basic rules to follow are: 

• Keep your comms salt-free, especially when communicating over public channels or large internal channels with peers.

• When you don’t understand someone’s position, consider taking a curious approach versus a combative one. Most of the time people aren’t intentionally being malicious—they’re just struggling to express themselves appropriately—so give them some grace.

• Taking disagreements to a 1-on-1 venue instead of a larger channel will almost always result in a more reasonable discussion.

• Understating your point is naturally more persuasive than being hyperbolic. "I think there's some problems with this approach" opens hearts and minds far more effectively than "this sucks, what were you thinking?"

All of the above skills and qualities are worth developing. And not just because layoffs are awful, but because becoming more flexible, connected, skillful, in-demand, and level-headed can make your entire life more satisfying. 

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The Limits of Strategy and Resiliency

It can't be said too many times: Even if you have all of the above factors going for you, you’re not layoff-immune. You can become, at best, layoff-resilient, in part because one of the biggest factors impacting your layoff risk is the competency and foresight of your studio's management team.

For the past few years, I’ve felt a growing frustration about what looked like completely out-of-control spending and headcount growth at top studios. It’s a plain fact that many leaders in games and tech screwed up their projections and massively overhired in the wake of the post-COVID boom.

Obviously, overhiring isn’t the whole story: paid user-acquisition got stupid-expensive due to regulatory changes, and inflation screwed up everything, then interest rates rose faster and higher than most people expected, which led to investor funding drying up very quickly, all while the market got overcrowded and real revenues have dropped 12% since 2021.

A little-discussed stat: adjusting for inflation, total 2023 gaming revenues were actually 12% lower than the 2021 peak (source: Matthew Ball).

Some of these things were unpredictable. And gaming leadership teams are regular people with limited ability to forecast the future. But it’s still frustrating to see leaders talking about basic business fundamentals now when they’ve ignored those fundamentals for years on end.

And now… here we are. I consider myself lucky to have my job today with Odyssey Interactive, despite our first game Omega Strikers failing to meet our expectations, because my studio's founding team made a strategic decision to keep our team small even after we'd raised enough money to justify going bigger. Now we're in the genuinely lucky position of being able to put our heads down and focus on building our next games. I really hope that after this year a lot more studios are able to get to a similar position.

That's all I've got this week, folks. I've interviewed several very cool people for the next few issues of Push to Talk, including a lead community manager on one of the biggest games of the last decade, followed by a truly slept-on young studio leader who I think is going to make the next breakout hit game. Like, subscribe, etc. See you next Friday.