We talk a lot about the major challenges that the games business currently faces due to external economic factors, from fears of a consumer-spending-led recession through to price rises driven by component scarcity. That focus can sometimes overshadow other looming challenges – none of which, I would argue, is more potentially damaging and destabilising than the long-term impacts on industry staffing as a result of the past few years of massive layoffs.
Skillsearch’s Salary and Satisfaction surveys are always an interesting read, but this year’s report feels especially important given the climate in which it emerges. It provides important – albeit incomplete – context for conversations around the industry’s ability to attract and retain talent, at a time when those conversations are more difficult than they have been for a very long time.
Some of that context is just straightforwardly useful at clearing the air around discussions that have surfaced in the past few years. Remote working, for example, can often feel like an exposed live wire in conversations around industry working practices, but Skillsearch’s findings suggest that it’s entirely uncontroversial in a majority of workplaces.
While completely remote work is not the norm, neither is commuting to an office five days a week, with most workers across all industry sectors working remotely for at least a few days a week. The fact that this has quietly and unproblematically settled in as a standard practice in most workplaces is worth bearing in mind the next time some bright spark decides to tick off their entire workforce with a blanket back-to-office order, not least since the language of such proclamations tends to imply that remote working is a bizarre and aberrant luxury rather than a perfectly standard industry working style.
The real meat of this year’s survey, however, is to be found in its investigation of how people’s careers have been impacted by the successive waves of industry layoffs over the past few years. Around 40% of respondents had been laid off at some point, over half of those (22% of respondents) in the past year; another 28% work at studios that made redundancies in which they were not personally affected.
As an aside here, I do have methodological qualms about how Skillsearch conducts this research, but I think the data itself remains useful and insightful, even if its representativeness needs to be taken with a grain of salt. And even allowing for the likelihood of self-selection bias in the data, that set of figures gives a real sense for how wide a swathe of the industry has been affected, directly or indirectly, by recent layoffs.
“Career stability is top-of-mind for a lot of people”
It’s the corollary figure to that finding that should really be giving us pause, however. There’s a slightly naïve perspective which posits that years of layoffs have basically turned the industry into a hirer’s market, with lots of highly skilled staff floating around for companies to snap up, while fears about job security reduce people’s appetite for job hopping or pushing for better salaries and benefits.
Talking to people actually involved in hiring, however, paints a rather different picture. While there have certainly been opportunities to hire good people who have been laid off in studio restructures and closures, it generally remains extremely difficult to hire skilled, experienced staff. Skillsearch’s research presents a figure that points to the reason for that; 44% of respondents said that they are considering leaving the industry as a result of the redundancies, suggesting that career stability is top-of-mind for a lot of people, and that they’re willing to look outside the games sector to find it.
That has knock-on effects across every area of employment. More than 60% of people in every sector said they would consider job-hunting outside the games industry, rising to over 70% for programmers and over 80% for business ops staff, which are arguably the fields whose skills and experience transfer most easily into other career paths.
In other words, for a pretty significant number of industry workers, it looks like the grinding reality of years of endless redundancies has not encouraged them to knuckle down and hold on for dear life in their positions. Rather, they have responded by thinking about exit strategies and wondering about greener pastures elsewhere.
“Many of the skills of people who create and sell games are extremely marketable in other fields”
Problems with staff retention aren’t new for the games business. It’s an under-discussed but commonly known reality that many of the skills of people who create and sell games are extremely marketable in other fields – fields in which salaries and benefits often tend to be notably better.
The majority of people who work in games do so out of choice – out of passion and preference – not out of need. So for decades, there has been a steady brain drain of experienced, talented staff for whom prioritising their passions and preferences over salaries, benefits, and working conditions is no longer justifiable as they get older and the equations are complicated by family responsibilities.
If that equation is now also being changed by a widespread perception that industry careers are extremely unstable, the knock-on effects could be very damaging in the long term. There’s no substitute for experience, and no industry can easily weather a set of conditions in which staff with advanced skills and deep experience start moving towards the exit doors.
Skillsearch’s survey also pointed to generally negative views of AI among industry staff. The respondents displayed a cautious optimism about the technology’s ability to improve productivity in some areas (notably for small teams), but generally they didn’t think it would be a real game changer or force multiplier for development work.
What isn’t covered in the report, although it’s often discussed in private, is that pushing the adoption of AI also seems to be driving a slump in job satisfaction among exactly the highly skilled staff that the industry already struggles to retain. For a talented staff member in a technical, artistic, or design-led field, the sudden shift of much of their job role from “creating things” to “reviewing and fixing AI-generated things” is extremely unsatisfying – not a great sentiment if you’re relying on people’s passion for their craft to keep them working in this sector.
Meanwhile, the slowdown in hiring junior staff on the principle that many of the simpler tasks they used to be given can be automated with AI risks upsetting the industry’s demographic pyramid. If new staff aren’t effectively gaining the skills and experience needed to replace older peers lost to the attrition of industry brain drain, this is sowing the seeds of a potentially major problem.
The challenges of training and attracting staff with the very specific high-level skills needed to create games has been an evergreen topic of discussion for decades, but the focus is often on the entry level. What Skillsearch’s report this year highlights is that there’s just as big a problem – perhaps an even greater problem – at the other end of the career pipeline, where the industry’s ability to retain high-performing staff appears to be slipping badly.
The dream of working on games will always provide a reasonable supply of newcomers for entry-level roles, even if ensuring they have the required skills is still a challenge. But for the older and more experienced staff who are the backbone of the industry, the dream of job security might be proving more appealing right now.
