Your odds of finding a job in games | Amir Satvat’s Project Flagpole

The probability of any game industry applicant landing a job in the games industry is about 4% over a period of 12 months, according to a post by job resource aggregator Amir Satvat.

Satvat has helped more than 2,000 people find jobs in the game industry through his well-organized job resources on LinkedIn and his website. He’s a bit of a quant and has automated the scraping of new content from game industry job sites and aggregated the data in his job resources, making it easier for people to find the jobs that they’re looking for.

That 2,000 number is an amazing achievement, considering we first wrote about his efforts to automatically aggregate job information for the games industry in August 2023, when he had found 450 people jobs. He spoke recently at our GamesBeat Summit 2024 event in May.

Now he has an update on his assessment of the game industry job market, dubbed Project Flagpole. Satvat, who works in business development at Tencent for his day job, said he sees it as his duty to leverage what might be the largest repository of games job data globally to help game industry applicants make informed decisions.

Project Flagpole is a model where I’ve analyzed over 1.6 million data points gathered from his community resources, talent professionals, community members, and job applicants since November 2022. His goal is to offer the most accurate predictions of the games industry’s job market.

The data

As noted above, the odds of any given job applicant getting a job in the game industry is about 4% over a period of 12 months.

Second, the chance of someone previously employed in the games sector finding another games industry job within 12 months is slightly up, approximately 27%. Both of these numbers have been reported before.

But Satvat added a new data point at the community’s request: the odds of finding a role in games as a new applicant if you are out of school or have three or fewer years of work experience. He estimated the odds for this pool are slightly above 1% over 12 months.

Regarding the number of people unemployed, Satvat’s best figures still suggest that 30% or more of those laid off since November 2022 have been looking for a year or longer. The more time that passes, the richer the cascading model of these figures becomes. Of the 30,000-plus gamers laid off in nearly three years, Satvat’s best estimate, as of today, is that roughly 9,000 are still looking for work.

For the equilibrium of, on average, more people being hired in games versus being fired on a trailing 60-day basis, Satvat still believes this will happen in 2024. He sees this happening in late September 2024, about four to five weeks later than previously anticipated. As far as how long it will take for the net creation of jobs to fill all the roles that have been lost, he continues to estimate that this will take until the second half of 2027 or later.

These predictions are just his best guesses based on 1.6 million data points. They are intended to stimulate discussion with the most comprehensive data available.

“Let’s reflect on these insights carefully and compassionately,” he said.

I’m going to moderate a session with Satvat at XP Gaming Inc.‘s 2024 Summit in Toronto from June 13-14.