The State of the Game Industry 2024

The game industry is in a rather big turmoil when considering the job market. I've been reading a lot of articles and posts regarding the given topic, and here is my conclusion from those:

It seems that the main reason for the job market challenges is the layoffs that many companies have had after the "pandemic player numbers" started to shrink back to its normal yearly growth.

Game Industry growth chart by PwC's Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2022-2026, Omdia

The growth numbers we saw during the pandemic years (especially 2019-2020 ~34.5 billion growth, compared to 2018-2019 ~23.2 billion growth and 2017-2018 ~18.8 billion growth) are something that doesn't happen that often. But when it does, a lot of companies go into more or less "panic mode" to react to the fast growth by recruiting more personnel. In 2023 that fast growth started to settle back to its normal state, which obviously led to layoffs.

I guess no one has the "crystal ball" to have a bulletproof answer to what happens next, but my wild guess would be that by the end of Q2 of 2025, the job market turbulence is more or less settled, and we're not calling it a "crisis" anymore. 

But here is the most interesting part: We still have that enormous amount of graduates and juniors who began their journey in the "rapidly growing game industry" during the pandemic years. Can these people find jobs within the industry?

The easy answer is no, since many of these graduates will eventually drift away from the industry to earn a living, and the ones who stay will eventually find their place. But how do you stay within an environment that doesn’t offer the required living?

Luckily, game development is accessible to anyone nowadays. Not only for the people who work within a company, but for people who are willing to open up a game engine and start working with games. It’s even a little insane how easy it is to make commercial games nowadays. Heck, you can even make those without knowing how to code and release on platforms that have millions of users with a low to no budget.

Statista March 6th 2024, Number of games released on Steam

Obviously, a lot of people have discovered that, and the number of “indie games” released on all platforms has exploded into space within the past years. Which led to markets being saturated by thousands of titles released on a daily basis. “Luckily,” a big amount of these games are released with very minor understanding of the industry, trends, niches, and the business itself. Which means that there is still plenty of room for products that have a clear target audience in mind and for products that meet the so-called “quality standards” of that given audience.

I feel that it’s more important than ever to give these juniors and graduates as much knowledge, tools, and guidelines as possible to be able to create those games themselves. So if you’re in the industry already and reading this, why not pay a visit to your local event and talk to those newcomers, I bet that even a 15-minute discussion will be more valuable for them than you can ever imagine.

And for the graduates. If there are no open positions available for your experience, you can get that experience by working on your own games independently. Maybe it’s just some hours per week, but at least you have a chance to do that. In many industries, that’s not even an option to consider.