Jobs remain the issue. As shockwaves from Xbox and Ubisoft restructuring continue to reverberate around the industry, we speak to Moby Professional's Reece Denzel about how MobyGames aims to reinvent game worker recruitment.

Next, Cognition Europe explains how cultural preservation and founding games on hard science formed the forthcoming Lunar Strike.

Finally, Steam Deck and party-game chat in Social Commentary, some Extra links, and an overview of Edge 426.

As an ever-increasing amount of game industry workers face the challenge of finding new jobs, Atari-owned MobyGames has opened the beta for Moby Professional, a careers and networking platform built on top of its 25-year-old database of game development credits. 

The tool, aimed at developers, publishers and contractors navigating an apparently endlessly volatile hiring market, launches with a free tier for claiming and managing individual profiles and a $14.99-a-month premium tier which adds job market intelligence and networking features. 

Product manager Reece Denzel has spent roughly a decade in the industry, including time on the investment team at crowdfunding platform Fig and in PlayStation's corporate development department. He says his experience highlighted problems in how videogame talent gets discovered and hired. 

The problem 

Denzel traces the issue back to how the industry has traditionally evaluated success. 

"There's a lot of emphasis on spreadsheets and there's a lot of emphasis on numbers, but it's a space where that abstraction doesn't always perform very well," he says. He points to the recent run of studio closures and franchise misfires as evidence: "[The industry] kind of fundamentally misunderstood what made this franchise great or we fundamentally misunderstood why this game development team was able to to pull off something so successful… Triple-A companies will buy the studio and will keep the IP, as if it's the IP that has all the value. And it's like, 'Oh, wait a minute. Actually, maybe it was the people all along.'" 

This problem, he argues, plays out just as badly at the individual hiring level. With companies fielding "thousands of applications for every single job opening", game industry recruitment has degenerated to a form of cowboyism: "Here's a resume, here's a cover letter. Trust me, bro. Like, this is what I did." Validating any of it, he says, is left entirely to the hiring company. 

The most-used professional networks don't solve the issue, in his view. LinkedIn, for example, will show that someone worked at a studio, or on a specific game, but rarely more. 

"Everybody working in this space knows that any role title can mean any number of different things," Denzel says. 

"What we really want to provide is that level of granularity that's so relevant in the process. Telling people, 'This person was an animator,' isn't necessarily going to help me elevate that. Everybody who's applying to this position is an animator. What we can do is say, 'This person was an animator, and they specifically worked on 2D platformer games that were released between 2010 and 2025, primarily developed for the Nintendo Switch. Worked a lot in Unity; maybe did a little bit of work in Unreal.' 

"We're going to be able to help sift through a lot of that noise and, again, get to that level of detail that nobody else really can."

Free tier, paid tier 

The free tier centres on claiming a profile. Anyone with an unclaimed page can submit a claim, which is then run through a verification process before the profile is linked to their identity.

"Once we've made that link, now we know it's you, now we know your background, and now we're able to go off and start building these features," Denzel says. 

The paid tier, at $14.99 per month, builds on that foundation with what Denzel describes as three pillars: enhanced, personalised information on job opportunities and hiring companies; ongoing updates on a user's network, including games and companies relevant to them; and, arriving imminently, a portfolio feature for artists and animators to host work samples directly on their MobyGames page. 

Pricing, he says, reflects a deliberate positioning rather than a direct comparison to LinkedIn Premium.

"Nobody's doing exactly what we're doing," he argues, framing MobyGames as sitting between generic professional networks and credit-tracking databases such as IMDb, neither of which serves games specifically. Asked whether the tool is designed for active job seekers or continuous use, he is clear it's the latter, particularly for contractors: "You're always looking to see what's available in the market… We're trying to provide that constant intelligence layer for the user." 

Why MobyGames? 

Denzel's case for why MobyGames can succeed where others haven't rests on the depth and trust of the underlying data. Network connections in Moby Professional are drawn automatically from historical credit data rather than requiring users to send connection requests. 

Business-development features referenced in the launch material – market mapping, competitor tracking, co-development partner discovery – remain individual-focused for now rather than enterprise-facing, though Denzel says the team is "extensively thinking through" how the platform can be more useful "to entities, to, researchers, to the press, to anybody."

Can science non-fiction sell? Cognition Europe believes so. Centred on the question of the preservation of human artefacts, Lunar Strike, the Belgian studio's debut title, casts the player as a junior archivist inside humanity's last lunar colony in 2119. When sabotage pushes the settlement towards collapse, decisions need to be made about what gets saved or lost for good. 

Knowledge spoke to creative director Brian Pope and development director Jan Goossens about the premise, the commercial opportunity for educative fiction of this type, and the trade-offs of building a game tightly bound to reality. 

The problem: what survives destruction 

For Pope, the starting point predates the game by more than a decade. 

"I was sitting in a Paris café, reading about how ISIS was destroying an ancient Roman ruin called Palmyra, in Syria," he says. "I had a sense of helplessness and outrage that washed over me. It reminded me of how I'd felt years earlier, when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan." 

As a former visual-effects artist, Pope recognised the tools already existed to respond, and founded The Arc/k Project, a non-profit that trains volunteers in lidar and photogrammetry to scan heritage under threat. 

"We pioneered the idea that concerned citizens could do 3D archiving themselves, and decide what heritage mattered to them," he says. The organisation built what Pope calls "the best digital archive of Palmyra out there," drawn from crowdsourced tourist photographs and archaeological survey data – "something we feel belongs to the Syrian people themselves." 

The same tension runs through Lunar Strike's fiction. The colony's antagonists, a radicalised Earth-first faction, believe humanity has no business in space while the home planet's problems remain unsolved. Pope was insistent they not be written as cartoonish. 

"This is a tension that actually exists right now," he says. "I wanted a villain with a reasonable set of beliefs, even if I disagree with the conclusion he draws from them."

From citizen science to playable archive 

Pope describes space as the logical next frontier for The Arc/k Project's mission. 

"We've already generated a tremendous number of artefacts and stories that will inform history for the next thousand years, and we're not very good at archiving any of it," he says. 

That translates directly into game mechanics: players scan objects and people using techniques modelled on lidar, photogrammetry and Gaussian splatting, the method of reconstructing 3D scenes and items from a set of 2D photographs. 

"If you photograph something from enough directions in a second or two, you can generate enough data to build a 3D model, one that could even be 3D printed," Pope explains. "That matters in the game, and in real life, because heritage is fragile. It can be stolen, vandalised, destroyed, lost." 

The central dilemma – what to keep, what to jettison – draws, fittingly, on reality. 

"Neil Armstrong's boots were left on the Moon out of necessity," Pope says. "The mission had collected so many geological samples that the crew couldn't take the extra weight. As archivists, we archive everything, even what got left behind. One man's garbage is another man's heritage." 

The constraints: real physics, real audience 

Building within realistic lunar physics presented certain problems. 

"If you jumped a metre on Earth, you'd fly six metres on the Moon," Goossens notes. "If players can't change direction mid-flight, that gets frustrating fast. We had to work out how much of that we could bend before it stopped feeling real." 

Where the team did bend reality, it chose to say so. For example, an orbital station in the game sits at an altitude from which, their astrophysics consultant confirmed, it would actually fall. 

"We kept it anyway, for the game's sake," Goossens says. "But in the archive, you can read the science that says it shouldn't be there. We don't think our audience are just people shooting things behind a screen. We think they're serious enough to want to know where we took a shortcut, and that they'll respect us more for admitting it." 

It's that seriousness that forms Pope vision of the game's intended audience. 

"The crossover audience is anyone who wants a sense of wonder – an adventure that's realistically grounded but still engages with the potential of humanity," he says.  

"We're tired of Frankenstein stories where technology is only ever the villain. We wanted to tell one about using technology to solve a problem, even when it caused that problem." 

Goossens is candid about the commercial risk of originality. 

"Everyone says the concept is completely unique," he says. "That's flattering, but it worries us too – does the audience not exist, or is it just unserved?" 

Cognition Europe is already thinking beyond the game itself: Last Rocket Out Pictures, a sister venture in early development, is working to extend the same world into film and television.

SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Highlights from industry chat channels

What was it about 1666: Amsterdam that made creative director Patrice Désilets put himself through years of legal wrangles and associated difficulties in order to realise his dream? "It's a really good question," he laughs. "First, I knew that we had something. Then, when Ubisoft eventually kicked me out of the office, my partner and I went to have a sandwich. When we received the bill, it was $16.66. I was like: 'OK, let's continue'." 

The coincidences didn't end there. Further instances of serendipity helped to reassure Désilets that the 1666: Amsterdam project was worth pursuing, and in Edge 426, out now, he and his colleagues at Montreal's Panache Digital explain how they've pushed towards the finish line on an idea that first stirred into life towards the end of the PS3/360 era.  

In other features, Hideki Kamiya's Collected Works guides us through his celebrated CV, from Resident Evil to the forthcoming Okami sequel, while in The Making Of… we talk to Blue Manchu about the creation of Void Bastards, and in Time Extend we rewind to the GameCube launch for another run at Super Monkey Ball. Dan Marshall's Size Five Games is the focus of our Studio Profile slot, and elsewhere we check in with Fumito Ueda to discover some of the inspiration behind the forthcoming Gen Atlas.  

As per tradition, our post-Summer Game Fest edition is a preview special, featuring 100 forthcoming games to watch, while new releases such as Star Fox, Rhythm Paradise Groove, Beastro and Gothic 1 Remake arrive for review. 

Edge 426 is in UK shops now and available to buy online here.

We'll be back next week. In the meantime, don't forget to share your feedback with us by email ([email protected]), and follow us via Bluesky and LinkedIn.