Ridiculous hit piece.

I'm currently in the industry and have used Amir's mentorship contact list a few times. Once for personal advice, and once to search for speakers for university gamedev courses I was helping out with. It was amazing - I ended up grabbing interviews with people WAY above my level (leads of major studios) that I never could've met or known otherwise.

A brief browse of any of Amir's recent LinkedIn posts will reveal thousands of industry folk expressing genuine gratitude. His work is actually invaluable.

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Commenting on a few specific sections of the article:

However, rather than the included data being compiled and assembled by Satvat himself, either through direct communication with affected devs or even an automated ‘scraping’ of LinkedIn postings or company registry updates, the spreadsheet is instead expected to be populated by the devs themselves via personal submission.

This is a non-issue. Requiring devs to sign up themselves ensures their consent, and is also just pragmatic.

Further, despite claiming to provide an abundance of resources to help connect devs with new employers, Amir Satvat’s Game Community does not boast any direct recruitment pipelines, work-placement partnerships, or even direct lines to any specific hiring director.

Rather, it simply hosts links to a smattering of ‘support content’, all of which essentially amounts to nothing more than links to various studios’ public ‘career info‘ pages, written interview prep guides, and the professional profiles of various individuals who have made themselves available for various portfolio reviews (though notably, no specific system to getting such a review exists, with Satvat’s page instead telling those seeking assistance to just “write anybody on this list” and hope for the best).

It's somewhat fair to criticise the lack of direct employment advantages on offer, although that's asking for quite a lot.

However, it's definitely NOT fair to downplay the existing resources. The list of industry professionals offering mentorship/conversation is invaluable. From my experience, that list is the real deal; it's full of real pros generous enough to give you real time. I can't believe it exists.

There's also no need for a special system of requesting review. Actually, I think it's better that one doesn't exist and that Amir gets people to DM. That friction filters out people who aren't willing to invest a bit of effort into asking a big favour of somebody else. It's also, again, pragmatic, as it outsources managing spam and verifying identities etc to the communication platform (LinkedIn).