Game job seekers: Here’s updated data on where the 14,162 game jobs are open globally | Amir Satvat

Amir Satvat, the game industry job resource quant, announced that he has created the most accurate geographic mapping of open video games jobs ever created with a list of 14,162 jobs that are open now in the game industry across the globe.

It took Satvat, a director of business development at Tencent, more than two years to come up with this geographic mapping of game job roles. Back when I asked him about this, his v1.0 of the Games Jobs Workbook listed only 400 jobs. Now this list, on its 14th version, uses data from a new method that Satvat says is 95% to 99% accurate, with the data being generated semi-automatically, with a way to verify accuracy, and a process to extract location data for each job at an individual level.

And I am pleased to announced that Amir will be a speaker at our GamesBeat Next 2024 event on October 28-29 in San Francisco.

The back story

In my 27 years of covering the game industry full time, I’ve wondered about this number and how relevant and meaningful it could be to those looking jobs. For instance, it might make sense to move to the cities where the open jobs are, and avoid the ones where they don’t exist. Game job seekers have never had such transparency across the decades.

Back in 2017, I wrote a story entitled “Where in the world are the game jobs?” I answered as best as I could at the time, with no real-time and consistent global data. One of the inspirations was one study by Indeed.com that delved into game industry openings advertised on its job site. One thought I had about getting real-time data on actual jobs was to find out where the seats of game engines were. I asked both Epic Games (maker of the Unreal Engine) and Unity for the data, but they didn’t have anything for me. Nobody had a great list of jobs or job openings, though the Indeed.com offered a single snapshot in time of their list of openings. The Game Dev Map was one of the best resources at the time, but it chronicled where the game studios were, not job openings or current employment.

I first talked to Satvat, the job resources quant who has now helped 2,400-plus people find jobs in gaming, about this problem in October 2022. He thought about it and took it seriously. He focused on job openings rather than total jobs, and that certainly seems more valuable to job seekers. Of course, since that time years ago, we had a pandemic and remote work became a thing. So now jobs that are listed as openings in certain cities may in fact be filled as remote jobs.

But Satvat noted he has been able to separate which listings are advertised as remote jobs. One thing you’ll notice is that the return to on-premise work is in full swing.

For now, this is an amazing accomplishment. Satvat answered questions of why this list of openings is different from all other mappings of the industry?

This data builds on other important work Satvat has done on behalf of job seekers. Satvat has been able to forecast that September is the month in 2024 when the number of job openings will surpass the number of job layoffs in the game industry. He estimates that around 2,000 to 3,000 or so jobs (at first this number was over 4,400) will be cut during the second half of 2024, compared to more than 11,000 in the first half.

He calculated the odds of finding game jobs for those looking for work fresh out of school (1%) versus the odds for veterans (27%) across the course of a year. And so he has provided real motivation for people to double down on their job searches to stay in the game industry. I’ve been writing about these predictions he has been making single-handed way in his off time, and have seen no other such data from the biggest companies in games.

The data on job openings

He noted that other mappings lack comprehensive coverage of underlying roles. Others only show the number of companies in each area, not actual job openings or live hiring data, as presented here. Other mappings categorize companies at a company location level rather than mapping every single role one-by-one as Satvat has done.

And he noted he is currently updating the Games Jobs Workbook itself. If you notice some discrepancies, it’s because this data is more current. As mentioned, he can geomap 14,162 open games roles.

He noted that he has an ability to now map at a role level, 1,980 games roles (14%) are remote, and 12,182 (86%) are not.

By continent, Satvat said the most games jobs are in Asia (4,601), Europe (4,008), and North America (3,248). These three regions account for 84% of the jobs.

At a country level, the most games jobs are in the United States (2,316), China (1,965), England (1,041), Japan (588), and Poland (456). These six countries account for just over half (51%) of the jobs, Satvat said.

By state or region, just for North America, the most jobs are in California (1,113), Quebec (528), Washington State (271), British Columbia (217), and North Carolina (155). These five states and regions represent 16% of worldwide games jobs and 71% of the jobs in the United States and Canada.

California alone holds 48% of the games jobs in the United States. The Entertainment Software Industry‘s own survey corroborates this kind of figure. The ESA, which previously staged E3, is the trade association in the U.S. for the game industry.

The ten biggest games cities are Shenzhen (946), Shanghai (629), Montreal (515), Tokyo (428), London (383), Warsaw (239), Vancouver (209), Bangalore (202), Istanbul (181), and Barcelona (180). These ten cities comprise 28% of worldwide games jobs.

As a gesture of gratitude to me, Gina Joseph of GamesBeat/VentureBeat, and Eva Tucker for their support throughout this two-year journey, as I built layer upon layer of data and analytics to produce this, Satvat said he is sharing the raw results with the community.