The gaming industry has been going through tough times in terms of hiring and firing over the past few years: thousands of professionals have lost their jobs and the trend, according to a survey by career aggregator InGame Job, is not improving. Gamesindustry.biz portal speakthis prevents the normalization of vacancies in the game.
Reasonable claims can be made about the representativeness of a voluntary survey; People who have lost their careers may be more responsive to such surveys, which could create systematic biases in the results. However, annual comparisons are less prone to such problems and are much clearer.
The survey data paint a picture of an industry in which, compared to last year, more workers lost their jobs against their will and fewer voluntarily changed jobs. The latter point means that many respondents prefer job stability to career advancement – a clear symptom of a climate of uncertainty about the future.
Those forced to look for work are at a disadvantage. Despite long-standing concerns about a lack of qualified developers, in reality the number of available positions is far less than the number of applicants, which allows employers to reduce the salaries of new employees and limit raises for current employees.
Why does this happen? First, it's worth examining why the gaming industry has been hit by a wave of catastrophic closures and layoffs. The main reason is financial and exogenous – borrowing costs increased sharply after many years of low interest rates.
The higher interest rates, the less willing companies are to take on risk – and few industries have the ability to mitigate risk like video games. Development prices are rising, even though revenues for most projects are stagnant. For many years, strong growth in the gaming audience masked this problem, but now the growth rate has slowed significantly.
As a result, it turns out that the gaming industry isn't just dominated by hits – games that don't achieve massive popularity will have difficulty recouping their development costs. In the past, when major publishers were more prone to risk and loans were cheap, many companies were willing to throw money at various projects and studios in the hope of landing a Fortnite or GTA killer. Financial failure for most of these projects is considered an acceptable outcome. But now interest rates are higher and risk profiles have changed, exposing the industry's shaky foundations.
In theory, the economic cycle should once again lead the gaming industry to growth, but in reality, this situation has existed for several years. If the pace of layoffs has slowed, it's because most studios have downsized extremely severely — not because the conditions that led to the layoffs have changed. Interest rates are still high and no one wants to take risks anymore.
But there is another factor. It's an open secret that the gaming industry is experimenting with Generative AI, but ordinary developers' views on the potential of artificial intelligence are sometimes very different from what top managers dream of. As a rule, the former are much more cautious, sometimes even colder, in their assessments of AI. It's not that neural networks can make them ineffective – they're simply extremely unreliable, even in tasks that are considered easy for artificial intelligence, like code generation.
Developers' concerns about widespread adoption of AI focus on these errors and the very real possibility that careless use of AI will lead to increased workload – everyone will have to fix AI errors, which will only make things worse. And controlled studies show that neural networks do not make development more efficient.
But such warnings tend not to always resonate at the top levels of the industry, where many have been hit by the bullish moves of AI companies burning through investor money at an unprecedented rate. They are only motivated by sales growth to open the next round from investors. Of course, real AI tools are evolving, but for now, the gap between what they can do and what their creators promise is too wide.
The negative effects of pursuing AI productivity can last for years. Games today are developed in cycles that sometimes last up to five years, meaning studios that bet on losing bets have to pay for them much longer. At the same time, being cautious about AI can yield results in 3-4 years. The industry has time to develop hiring policies that can deliver maximum benefits in a market filled with talented, experienced people.
