This article was originally published on August 28, 2026 - read the full issue

By Patrick Garratt

Amir Satvat, Tencent's development director since 2023, has emerged as a recruitment hero of sorts in the game industry for having created Always Supporting the Games Community (ASGC) in 2022, a drive dedicated to "empowering gamers at every stage of their career with comprehensive support, resources, and a thriving community environment." He isn't remunerated in any way for ASGC, taglining its objective thus: "We help gamers get hired. Zero profit, infinite caring."

His opening keynote at Gamescom Dev in Cologne this week – titled "The Games Industry Reset: What Happened and What Comes Next?" – aimed to help the audience better understand the reasoning behind much-publicised job losses and violent structural transformations in the post-COVID videogame industry.

Knowledge spoke to him at the Koelnmesse the day after his speech.

Reset, not recovery

Having collected data on job losses, successful recruitment, regional shifts and the adapting fortunes of the industry's various development sectors – triple-A, double-A, indie, and so on – Satvat is adamant that we are not seeing a temporary correction. Some 15,000 losses will occur this year, he estimates.

"To say that we haven't had big resets and changes like that in the past is to not know the history of the industry," he said, citing the arcade-to-console transition and the rise of mobile as comparable shifts the industry absorbed.

What is different now, he argued, is the scale of the geographic rotation of jobs out of North America. What hasn't been understood up to this point is just how much of the overall losses have occurred in the US. According to Satvat's data, North America has lost roughly 25,000 roles, or about 15 per cent of its workforce since he started tracking the issue in 2022, with California alone accounting for over 50 per cent of global layoffs during one 12–18 month stretch. Effectively, while layoffs have reached crisis levels in specific areas, the situation on a global level is that industry staffing is remaining roughly static, with employment in growth regions such as India and China being generally undercounted. In reality, said Satvat, the industry is undergoing a "geographical cycling" of jobs away from expensive areas, specifically the US and western Europe, towards regions in which games are cheaper to make.

Asked what publishers headquartered in the US and western Europe should do differently in the face of this predicament, Satvat refuses to frame it as zero-sum and notes that a shift in perception about the value of game workers in other areas of the world is long overdue: "If someone else in Vietnam or Chile has a job, they're a human being too."

His advice to development and publishing staff in the hardest-hit regions was blunt: "You have to think of yourself more as maybe this globetrotting person who might have to be in different places over time."

On China, too, he is unequivocal that western studios cannot remain ambivalent.

"It's just a massive, massive market and it's only going to grow," he said. His advice for the disengaged is simple: get on a plane. "There's simply no substitute for going there, seeing the studios."

Is any of this reversible? "If I put on my most rose-coloured glasses, I could see a scenario where we stabilise roughly at where we are now," he said, "but can we go back to where we were in the 2020 to 2022 period? I find that hard to believe."

Small is beautiful

Satvat's other central thesis is that the industry must relearn to celebrate modest, sustainable success. Pressed on the reported framing of Halo: Campaign Evolved's half a million PlayStation sales as a disappointment, he was scathing about existing top-end development economics.

"If we have a game that costs $300–400 million, you're going to have to make well over 500 million units just to recoup marketing and everything else."

His preferred model is internal "skunkworks". He highlighted Jaeho Hwang's Mint Rocket division within Nexon, maker of Dave The Diver, as proof that small, disciplined teams can thrive inside larger organisations, comparing it to Blizzard incubating Hearthstone alongside World Of Warcraft during its "golden days". The alternative, he said, is corrosive: "You're now setting up these binary scenarios where for every single game you have a do-or-die scenario, and I can't see how that's good or sustainable for anybody."

He's talking about the much-cited "death of triple-A", a framing he rejects. But while big-budget development will obviously continue, the hiring data documents a visible shift. Triple-A's share of open roles has collapsed from over half to under a third of the global total in four years. Satvat split the causes into two buckets: "Traditional triple-A developers who've had challenges on some of these very high-cost projects," and studios "invested in by financial investors or operators who then couldn't make good on those investments."

The increasingly common solution to big-budget cost aversion, hiring external developers, is throwing up its own issues as the squeeze on triple-A intensifies, which Satvat said in his keynote needs to be addressed. This type of contracting comes with obligations, he said, starting with proper credit.

"Many people who work on projects can't even talk about what they worked on for entire years, because it's kind of hush-hush." Long-term, he predicts an "equalisation" as contracting continues.

The room's greatest elephant: worker's rights

The treatment of workers in relation to changes in the game industry job market extends far beyond cross-dev, though, with large-scale layoffs at companies such as Microsoft provoking sustained union action. He made recommendations at the end of his keynote to better the situation, such as companies providing continuous learning for workers and focusing on smaller teams with tighter budgets, but when asked which of his recommendations the industry is farthest away from implementing, he didn't skip a beat. "I think it's farthest away from treating workers responsibly," he said, locating the cause in a power imbalance worsened by anxiety over AI: "Employees have been through a lot. People are very reticent to ask for anything."

For Satvat, the fix starts with basic management, not policy documents.

"I would set time every month with everybody who reported to me," he proposed, referencing how he operated in previous management roles. "That was their time, and they were not allowed to talk about work."

Even this low bar is rarely cleared in game development and publishing, and harder commitments such as ongoing training and career preparation for laid-off staff remain largely non-existent. "I feel like, for most people, these things are on another planet as kind of niceties to maybe fund in some hypothetical state of everything going well," he said. "The idea that people would do that when things are going terribly [is false] – and, ironically, that's the time when you need to do those things the most."

Trust, not extraction

On investment, Satvat's advice to studios raising capital is disarmingly simple: ask the funder what excites them about the studio "that's anything other than the financial returns." He cited Lincoln Hershberger of Devolver's Big Fan label as a model investor that people trust precisely because those involved repeatedly claim that "Lincoln cares about me, Lincoln cares about my studio."

That trust, he argued, is the fulcrum on which the industry's future balances. He worries about two outcomes: an "extraction" scenario where mature IP gets bought up and stripped for value, or a "small ball" future where studios become too wary to collaborate or grow at all.

The deciding factor, he said, is not really in developers' hands.

"If they get pushed too hard by the people collaborating, that takes you in the direction of 'extraction'. If they now are so worried about collaborating with others or picking up headcount, you now have 'small ball'. I actually don't put the onus of this on the developers. I put the onus on everybody around the developers in the ecosystem to support them."

Game over for Gabe? Steam faces a "Manhattan Project breakthrough"

While Satvat is usually known in the community for his work on placing those seeking jobs, discoverability remains a constant topic in all discussions surrounding development and the financial situation to which it is tethered. Satvat dropped something of a bomb in terms of what may be about to happen to Steam's ostensibly unassailable hegemony. Genuine competitors are coming.

A wave of skunkworks development is trying to build real platform alternatives to Steam itself, he told us, and not the Epic Games Store model we've seen play out before, but closer to what an indie-focused publisher such as Raw Fury represents: a leaner, more curated B2C alternative.

Within this bucket, he also flagged a specific further idea gaining traction: platforms built around social discovery, essentially "people play what their friends play", rather than algorithmic or storefront browsing.

In addition, tools are in development, he said, designed to help developers get much sharper on who their players actually are and how they behave, a mix of "inside-out" systems that assess engagement and playerbase data and "outside-in" approaches which aggregate anonymised signals from places such as Reddit or Discord to give studios a sense of who likes a game (or doesn't) even before, or without direct access, to that data. Steam, he said, is about to be challenged.

"I think, given the amount of money and the number of smart people I see working on those two big categories of things, I would be amazed if in the next one, two, three years someone doesn't have a Manhattan Project breakthrough on one of those."

This article was originally published on August 28, 2026 - read the full issue