Amir Satvat, the playing champion, recently estimated that around 230,000 people worked in the game industry. Which sounded low in Kenn White, one of the leaders of the leaders Game industry coffee cat. White’s crew therefore dug the figures for themselves and found their own defensible estimate from 740,000 to 900,000.
White, a long -standing game developer, said in a LinkedIn article that the median number of their estimates (ranging from the low -end to high -end) is 833,000 employees in the game industry in more than 25,000 companies. It seems much more impressive, but it is such a great variation in relation to the estimate of the bottom of Satvat. SATVAT has increased its estimate to around 350,000, depending on its own analysis of White’s information, but both parties remain fairly distant for people directly employed in games.
White said in its article that this estimate includes developers and publishers working in PC, Console, Mobile, AR / VR, as well as external developers and subcontractors.
It includes functions such as art, engineering, production, management, marketing, sales and other functions SG & A and Admin. It is not intended to include (and we have tried to make sure that we do not include) the workforce and companies whose main competence does not consist in developing or publishing games.
“When we were working on this list (Kenn White,, Brandon Hagermanand still other), we were able to collaborate with Amir Satvat In a very open, honest and top and bottom methodology, and what continued to ask us:
Why has no one did this job before to understand this? “Said Neil Haldar, a veteran from the game industry.
Haldar added: “This is supposed to be an answer for a snapshot in time. We could go back and re-lime research at some point, but it is not supposed to be a work set forever that many others will work on Ad infinitum.”
He said the group was open to comments and will continue to work on the accuracy of the estimate and hypotheses. The group has estimates for each country in terms of low and high estimates of the population of the employee of the game industry.
Satvat declared in a message to Gamesbeat that he supports the exercise of the group and that they deserve the merit of having made their figures with realistic information to save it. He acknowledges that the café chat in the game industry, which is a descendant of a group that I frequent on Clubhouse, deserves the merit of their research. SATVAT’s own estimates come from a lower counting approach.
“For the context, the 230,000 figures that I used specifically focused on game developers, based on the aggregation of open role data and entertainment estimation for studios without public numbers.
This is why he increased his estimate to 350,000.
Savat added: “But the really interesting change comes from the reframing of the definition – not only by counting the game developers, but all the people working in the game industry. This wider framing is what could bring the number to 600,000, 700,000 or even more.”
And he said: “Although still relatively small compared to certain industries, it is much larger than anything I saw before – most of the global development estimates greater than around 350,000. I therefore think that this new framing will open a healthy and important discussion.”
Satvat counted the developers linked to publicly visible employment pages, live lists and traceable hiring activity.
“This is always how I do it. If someone believes that the actual number is higher-and I am more and more convinced that it is much higher-I always ask: which company, with current open roles, we miss us? I want to know so that we can put these jobs before real people looking for work,” he said. “This is the reason why my estimate exists. At any time, people like Mayank Grover and I never see only 10,000 to 15,000 play roles open worldwide. ”
He noted that researchers from Cafe Coffee Cat do not dispute this point of data.
“But this is where things become fascinating – and why I was so inspired by the work of the GICC community.
They attack the same question from a completely different angle: a model descending data from the global census, reports from the Labor Office and academic pipelines. This wider lens could win their estimate at 1 million people and next to the industry, “said Satvat.” I love it and I like this exercise.
Rigor, effort, transparency – that’s all the data work. Also allow me to explain why the reconciliation of this number is difficult and why I still have many open questions, intended for a cooperative and curious framework. »»
He noted that even if a figure from top to bottom is correctly correct, it must pass other sniff tests – and this is where things are starting to stretch and we must answer difficult questions. Unemployment mathematics is a way to check the data.
“If we believe in 240,000 workers and see 10,000 to 15,000 open jobs, this represents around 20% unemployment. But if there are one million workers, this falls to 5% unemployment – in accordance with the general averages of American labor.
He noted that he follows 3,000 game studios that hire with regularity and have no dead websites.
“Let’s say that there are 5,000 studios active in the world and that many pass under our net. If there are one million people in the games, the average workforce per studio would be 200, which does not correspond to the real composition of an industry dominated by the small and medium -sized teams,” said Satvat. “And that would mean, as opposed to the long tail of most medium -sized teams that I follow with less than 10 people, they should be 20 times higher on average.”
Satvat noted that each large aggregator – LinkedIn, Hitmarker, works with Indies, etc. – Facing a coherent number of open work. If we were dealing with a million people’s industry, we expect much greater job activity in all regions and platform, said Satvat.
And if the numbers were so large, Satvat said that we would see heavy hires on the emerging markets. Instead, most high -performance and high comparison roles are still concentrated in North America, Europe and selected parts of Asia.
If you extrapolate a million workers at around 185 billion dollars in world game income, revenue mathematics by employees are starting to break – especially when adjusting roles in regions or sectors at lower cost with lower margins (QA, community, etc.), said Satvat.
Satvat said that his figures and the numbers of Gicc both count – because they measure very different things.
“Mine reflects the active” visible “active nucleus of the industry – and is designed to support people looking for work today. My initial estimate of approximately 240,000 comes from only counting companies with employment pages and public lists. But even knowing what I do now, I believe that the ratio analysis I used for the studios that I could not see was too conservative, “he said.
With hindsight – and after seeing how the GICC team has surfaced the world teams, regional repertoires and indirect contributors – Satvat said it would increase its estimate to 350,000.
This is because he now appreciates the volume of studios and teams that do not publish jobs in the usual places but who still employ staff.
“I have underestimated adjacent or support functions (QA, tools, operations, location) which are among the internal teams but are not always presenting in job sites,” he said. “And I have not taken into account as many Asia-Pacific and Mena ecosystems, where hiring is often more difficult to surface with standard scratching or monitoring methods, often because of the place where roles are listed or linguistic problems.”
That said, Satvat argued that even 350,000 are still a concept concentrated on the structured, salaried and generally visible work part of the global game workforce – not all the talent orbit with transferable skills or ambitious links with games.
Satvat thinks that GICC explores the larger career and skills ecosystem and represents the extent of the place where games affect the wider economy.
“I have no doubt that many of these roles exist – there are strong descending data suggesting that they do it – but I always find it difficult to see how or where to map them from an ascending point of view. This is what makes it so troubled for me”, Satvat. “In short, this is a very difficult number to pin – and even if we do it, it is just as difficult to ring it with a coherent definition.”
However, Satvat said: “If you ask me what a figure I will point people out to go ahead, I will refer to the GICC work. I strongly encourage everyone to review their estimate and the methodology behind it – it is thoughtful, transparent and offers a critical vision from top to bottom of the larger imprint of the industry. ”
He added: “That said, for my own modeling – in particular when estimated by the roles open from 10,000 to 15,000 people that we see at some point – I will continue to use a more conservative estimate of 350,000.
Satvat said he could be convinced to increase his estimate if someone shows him studios with live job offers that are not yet in the game jobs. This is how he will reconcile the gap between the elevator and the top from top to bottom – a real opportunity at the same time.
He said that whatever the number, his goal is to put more real jobs in front of real people, understand where the gaps are and to help each developer, artist and dreamer to find their way. He thanked Gicc for their efforts.
For my part, I think that the manufacturers of game engines have more data that deserve to be checked and I would like to see them weigh. Unity, Epic Games’ Unreal and even Godot could help us understand how many engines are used regularly and where they are. I encourage them to join this conversation. I heard it with them in the past.
By the way, Satvat has examined how many people work in external development studios and co-development (like keywords, which says that it has 13,000 people, and virtuos, which has 4,000). But it is also a difficult number to assess.
“If I use the total workforce and the open roles of this group and see what percentage is external development, I believe that it falls into the beach from 27% to 35%,” said Satvat. “In this area, as I discussed with Kenn, entrepreneurs are very difficult to estimate, which could be a factor of confusion.”
It is to assume that it is about a third, but he will examine more.
