I have decades+ in the American games industry. Bluntly speaking: don't join it. There are too many people chasing diminishing, shrinking (relative) job counts; large studios are offshoring more and more of their work; funding has dried up and we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel; there are too many games.

Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States.

The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States.

The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable.

Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up.

Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly.

Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior.

//edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them.

A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue.

At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output.

A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.

Compared to other industries, I’ve always held, perhaps a somewhat naive view that a game studio is a collective of talented artists, writers, composers, designers and developers working together to create something extraordinary.

Making money to keep the lights on is important, but I like to believe that for many studios, the collaborative process and the art of game creation matter more than maximizing profit at all costs.

So what’s is driving this move to outsource?

1. Greed by owners and investors?

2. Can't be profitable without outsourcing?

3. Other factors?

I get large publishers like EA or Ubisoft just focus on making money, but I do think there’s a strong case for greater solidarity or even unionization among smaller studios and suppliers. Look at an example from an adjacent sector -- Rhythm & Hues, the VFX studio that closed despite its creative success, largely because it lacked leverage against film production behemoths focused solely on profit.

What role do you think generative AI will play in this landscape?

Will it allow those folks who can't find jobs in the game industry to come together and create more smaller studios or empower existing smaller studios, those driven primarily by creativity and innovation, to compete more effectively and bring new kinds of games to life?