This article was originally published on July 17, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

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."

This article was originally published on July 17, 2026 - read the full issue