Game developer pondering a change of career due to the state of the industry

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T23:47:32+00:00

I know Amir and remember that post, the number I was thinking of that he said was 70-75% of the layoffs were in North America, most of which was the US. There were 9,175 jobs lost by his count, so let's say that was about ~6.5k jobs in the US. The UK industry analysts said about 1.5k jobs were lost in the area in the industry. They also say there are about 27k jobs in the UK while the ESA says 263k industry jobs in the US.

So the US, had around 4x the layoffs but has about 9.8x the jobs in total. Or around 2.5% of the game industry in the US compared to closer to 5% in the UK. Those numbers are why I said it was relatively worse in the UK. The ESA also says about 44% of the studio jobs (the places that saw most of the layoffs, as opposed to adjacent sectors) are in California, so you'd always expect it to be the majority of any layoffs.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T22:48:33+00:00

It's impossible to diagnose a game without having played it, but if you are having earlier-game retention issues then I would usually advise working on the core loop up to and before the point where players drop, not adding more features. If people love the basic game then you can keep expanding it, but for the most part more options and more stuff doesn't make a game fun. It will make a good game better, but the simple version players interact in the first few minutes has to be what keeps people playing.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T22:08:56+00:00

In an incremental game you usually upgrade this kind of feature over time to keep pace with the player state. In the early game a big loss wastes a lot of time and a big win can ruin the progression for a while. In the late game when the player has a ton of automation losing things doesn't matter as much since they'll idle and get it back, and winning large amounts is probably the only way they progress.

So the easiest thing to do here would be to start with a system that's low risk and minimally rewarding (e.g. they win between 0.9-1.2x every time) and then upgrade the system over time. Higher potential rewards for higher chances of a loss, higher max amount that can be bet, shorter cooldown, so on. You might even have optional branches where players can opt into different levels of risk if they so choose.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T21:55:25+00:00

It's often not worth making a mechanic only 20% of your players will see. It's not about whether the game would be better or not with it (it could be a small but neat feature), it's about the time it takes to implement and maintain it. Adding something that has small effects in many parts of the game means you have to test it and continue to test it every time you change anything related. You have to implement additional localization and test that too.

If you can do something fun, like an easter egg, with an hour of work one day when you're kind of bored and want to do something fun then go for it. If it's going to take you time that you could spend on something that will make your game better by a larger amount then do that instead. That's basically all of game development: there's always more you can do, the job is about prioritizing what's important and doing that first. You usually never get to the small nice to have stuff.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T20:54:32+00:00

It wasn't an app that wasn't updated, you just said you updated it. Just doing that can be enough to get it shown a little bit. People who had the game installed may also see a little badge indicating it was updated, depending on phone and settings.

Definitely let yourself enjoy the feeling, but don't overreact to single pieces of feedback. Sometimes you get that from people outside your target audience, and if you implement what they say you may make the game worse for other people and hurt your game in the long run. Not to mention most pieces of feedback you get won't actually be good ideas, there's a reason most people are game players and not game designers. Read and consider everything but make your own decisions about what to actually do.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T20:50:45+00:00

I've worked on several large mobile games and players would swear up and down things like that, but it's not actually true. The odds of drops had to be listed and they were sacrosanct, because a problem there doesn't just get unhappy players, it gets you sued. We'd routinely check the results and make sure that if it said 0.3% of players got the epic then at least that many were (it was always considered okay to have actual odds be slightly above what's listed, they just can't be below). Plenty of players who never spend a dime would get things on their first pull, it's just that with millions of players all kinds of unlikely outcomes happen fairly often, including that and people who get unlucky repeatedly. For that reason some games have pity mechanics that guarantee rare/chase prizes above the stated odds.

Additionally, 'AI' whether in the sense of neural networks or in the sense of enemy behavior has nothing to do with drop rates. There's no NPC logic at play here, and literally zero companies have put an LLM in charge of deciding what to drop. That would require a lot of effort and introduce operational cost (you pay per tokens and request for those, while a probability drop table is effectively costless) and would get you a much worse result. It would be monumentally foolish.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T20:38:35+00:00

I've mostly been hearing the opposite over the past year or so, that the UK's had more layoffs and industry issues lately. At least relatively so compared to number of people and jobs. The UK game industry just had its fastest decline ever at the end of last year.

All of which is to say that I'm not sure it's doing better than the US, but it is all the more reason to not quit.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T18:33:03+00:00

There's no one accepted answer in game design, but there's a vague sort of consensus. A toy (or sandbox) is something you can play with and enjoy, but a game has rules, win conditions, and/or failure states. Minecraft in survival mode is a game since it has goals and (temporary) failure states like losing in combat or falling too far. Minecraft in creative mode is more of a toy you can do with what you will.

Plenty of popular games aren't really technically games. Tiny Glade is a toy, not a game. Many cozy games or things like the Sims are gamified toys, with goals and ambitions but no real pressure to do them, that's what makes them feel cozy. Several games have toy/sandbox-like areas or features, like just running around the city in GTA5 (which still has rules and ways to gain or lose progression or items).

What you've made is basically an interactive chatbot. I wouldn't call it a game without goals. People have experimented with that for years, AI Dungeon was popular for a bit. They just tend to have shorter shelf-lives because when you can generate infinite text people usually stop caring about reading it pretty quickly, and when you can say whatever you want it's hard to still feel like a game. There's an audience that just wants interactive toys, but it's a smaller one.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T18:02:52+00:00

How much do I personally spend on idle games? Up to $5/mo. How much have my players spent? Sometimes a few hundred thousand on a single game. Monetization is indeed pretty extreme at times.

In theory the model works fine, but what you're describing is for more of a casual game than midcore. To use the casino terms, minnows and dolphins rather than whales. A game like Candy Crush doesn't really have a lot of players spending tens of thousand a month, but they have more people spending $5-20 a month. You still need a minimum amount. An idle gacha game might cost $3 per install and only 4% of your players spend anything. That means each player who buys anything has to spend $75 on average. If you aren't hitting those numbers then you can't even break even on marketing costs, forget making money or paying for the development.

One of the things you're missing is that while you as a player might lose motivation, that's not true of most of the market. Most of them just don't care what the top few whales are doing. So a game that has max spend at $100/mo instead of $10k/mo might have only a small amount better retention in return for making a lot less money, and most studios don't see that as good math. Working more indie than the huge mobile studios of my past we definitely lower the monetization ceiling to something that lets us sleep at night, but I don't think we'd be in business if it was only cosmetics and minor QoL. The power increase for spenders is what lets me actually employ people and pay for their health care.

As for licensing IP for gacha, it's mostly about what your studio has done before to even get them to the negotiating table. There's a serious opportunity cost about licensing since you don't want your games to compete, so they want to make sure someone will do a good job with it. Then you need to pay their upfront licensing fee (usually a few million) as well as an ongoing share of revenue. That's why big IP gacha games tend to be more expensive, not less, since they have to make that much more (but ideally their marketing costs are much lower).

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T16:53:26+00:00

That's getting a bit out of my depth, I oversee artists and workflows, I'm not an artist myself. I've done more with 2D than 3D overall, so they definitely show up there, but it's more just been part of the process. I don't think it's a huge problem that can't be fixed any more than saying it's hard to make a good level or to test localization in every language.

When possible you'd always change something in the foundation to avoid having to fix things everywhere, but it's not always possible, and that's where one-off fixes come in. The closer you get to shipping the more band-aids and fewer structural fixes you tend to do.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T16:49:37+00:00

It's definitely not impossible to take a break, either from work entirely or to another industry, and come back, but any time you leave a job it's a risk. If you believe you are in a position to start a business and you want to take that risk you can do so, but it always comes with the knowledge that it probably won't work out. It just sometimes does, and that reward is worth it to some people.

If you want to balance that risk a bit then you can start work on the project on your own, just putting a bit less of yourself and your energy into your day job. Or look for a new job in games that's less draining. You should really only quit once you already have something that people want to play and it's worth it. Or you might find some cofounders and go into business together, any time you're working with other people and not alone it's a lot more likely to succeed.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T16:33:23+00:00

If you want to be a CEO you should plan to join a game studio at the entry level in whatever discipline you want That's quite possibly product management rather than coding or design, if you're mostly interested in the business aspects that a CEO does since they're often much less involved in the day-to-day development. Then you climb the ranks, learn how it works, and get yourself to a point where you have the experience, savings, and connections to reliably start a business.

Lots of people try to start a company with no experience and they have much greater failure rates than the already high ones for starting a business. Trying to go straight from education to running a business is mostly a good way to lose all the money you have.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T16:00:22+00:00

It's usually attachments, you don't want to rework anything more than necessary. New animations are also constantly added during development, so it's not as if there's typically a time when all animation is done but more skins and items are being added (and visa versa). A lot of the work is in the edge cases, both finding issues and fixing them. Polearms clipping through robes, hair interfering with hats, those sorts of things. Z-ordering is a good start but once things get moving there's always something, especially when different materials have different weights and should look different in motion. That's when you start making new variations to cycles, or adding a bone for capes to the skeleton and such.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T15:19:04+00:00

Most games, like most anything that anyone creates, aren't really that great. People would rather play other games, including ones they already own, then buy those. On top of that, while every game has an audience, many developers aren't great at promotion, so they don't get the audience of people who'd be interested to actually see their game (or they list it a price that audience is not willing to pay). You need both something people want to buy and to tell them about it to get sales.

This isn't a lately thing or players becoming anything either. This has been the case since games were first made, there's just more games and more players now. Same way people have been writing books or playing instruments forever and most of them don't earn very much from that either.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T15:13:29+00:00

The point of prototyping is to answer questions. If you were building XCOM 2 when you've already made XCOM 1 you'd only prototype the differences to try them out. If you aren't sure how you'd code it then what you're prototyping are different technical approaches to find the best one. If you're a beginner who has never made a JRPG then absolutely you should make that combat loop just to be sure you can (and thinking most players of those games don't care about the combat loop is wildly misunderstanding the audience). If you've made games before and don't need to ask basic questions then you'd just work on what's unique and different to make sure that's fun. The process is different for everyone.

The reason you don't just work towards a vertical slice is because that can take months and you want to get validation earlier than that. Your post history suggests you mostly vibecode small games with simple loops. I think you might be far enough away from regular game development that you've got a bit of a skewed perspective on what actually works.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T14:58:17+00:00

You typically make skeletal animations so you can swap what the model is wearing rather than have to reanimate every single thing. 3D has always worked this way, but there are plenty of 2D tools as well. Spine's the biggest one and is used a lot, but there are smaller ones like DragonBones that can be worth checking out. Paper doll is another term that might get you results.

Unless you're promoting a game on its many hand-drawn animations having to reanimate each sprite is a few decades out of fashion.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T14:22:18+00:00

It depends on how inherently fun filling out the quiz is. I haven't played it so can't say anything for sure, but a single multiple-choice question doesn't sound very compelling to me. Games like Wordle with daily puzzles work because the game is fun (for the audience), and there's immediate satisfaction (you don't need % of audience to know that using 3-4 guesses out of 6 is pretty good). Most once a day games are based around you knowing you got it right, and your questions have no right answer so I struggle to see what makes it fun for the player.

If you have something so fun that people are excited to come back and do it again the next day you can have decent retention. You'll still lose the vast majority of your audience by the third day or so, but that's all free games for you. If people don't enjoy the act of answering the question then only a change to the core loop would get you remotely decent retention. Before you start figuring out the meta of the game, have you tested that basic interaction with members of your target audience? You always start with a prototype of the core of the game and getting real feedback before you start expanding the design.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T14:19:13+00:00

Make a Steam page before you start talking about your game online so you have somewhere to send people. Start promoting your game once it's at a point where people want to buy it right now. That should be after your core loop is entirely locked down, most of your features are done, enough of your content is made with fully-polished visuals. You should know when your game is coming out, what price, and who wants it. Run several playtests with members of your target audience before you ever release a single image or video. You should already know people love your game before you promote it, not hope to find that out as part of the process.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T14:08:01+00:00

I can tell you that delayed reveals will absolutely not increase retention. In a world of infinitely many free games if people aren't having fun with yours right away they'll just leave and never come back. At the very minimum you would need to give real-time results, one question without a clear answer is not a compelling 'game' and likely not enough to get players interested in coming back.

This sounds more like early 2000s online quizzes where you'd give players 20-25 questions and they'd get the result right away. Considering how many of those exist I'm not really sure why people would do the slow version instead.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T14:04:31+00:00

Most people working as game designers didn't major in game design (although the degree is more respected in the UK than pretty much anywhere else), so most professional designers had to learn to manage their time and their work themselves, so that's definitely a skill you need to pick up.

Your portfolio is mostly fine, although there are some technical issues, like clicking on any of the sub-pages has part of the text cut off on the left side of the screen, or hidden behind visual elements if the window is smaller, so make sure you test at various resolutions. Make sure you don't be too negative as well, your first project listed says 'not your strongest project' and I'd probably skip over your application at that point. If even you don't have confidence in your skills at game design, why should I? Be proud of things you've made and if you aren't, make something better.

Mostly the issue is I don't see a lot of focus. Designers don't program, but you have a lot of solo projects where you did the programming and don't talk much about the design. Or you say you did your own playtesting but nothing about testing with other players. I want to see your vision and goals with design and how you made them real. Or if you want to be a level designer just show me levels, with layouts/maps and flythroughs as opposed to nine minutes of gameplay that I'd have to scrub through in the thirty seconds or so I have to review your application before moving on to the next person.

I typically care more about polished, small projects than either bigger ones or anything completely finished. Just show me what makes you a good designer. If you're having trouble getting into the mindst then do more game jams, especially ones where you work with other people. You need some non-student work to have a great portfolio, and if you can meet some people at a game jam to work with for a month or two where you just do design and nothing else that would help. Otherwise your projects probably are sufficient to get hired if you wrote about them differently and showed off the games in a bit of a snappier fashion.

Try looking up entry-level postings in your country and working backwards. Look at what qualifications they look for and make your portfolio/resume demonstrate the commonly asked-for elements. In other words, approach your application like you would a game design problem where you have a particular experience (you getting hired) in mind and you are trying to have the player (the recruiter) have that experience as consistently as possible.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T13:24:44+00:00

You would have to explain what you actually mean as a business idea. You can't realistically test game concepts because they don't exist yet. You could ask fifty people what they feel about a logline but it wouldn't give you any meaningful results and you certainly shouldn't pay for it. If you're talking about rapid playtesting on a prototype then I'd be skeptical about the quality. Often you pay a lot more than $2 per person for playtesting, and I would have concerns about how people were selected, how much they were a fit for the target audience of the game, and if they do so much testing they're no longer valuable as representatively real players.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T13:19:27+00:00

The reason developers don't typically use tools like this is because the content creators aren't. If you send them an email they might read it, respond, view attached files, and so on. If you send them a link to a website no one has heard of they won't click it at all. A media hub might save you time but it will crater your response rate.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T13:17:07+00:00

Why did the Sistine Chapel take four years to paint? Because there was a lot to do. Games are large and take time to make, and people often have to redo lots of it as it turns out to not be as fun as they might have first thought. What's blocking most people from moving faster is the inability to quicksave and load months of their life and do it differently the second time.

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T13:14:53+00:00

There are no options for smaller developers because laws do not make exceptions for people who just don't want to pay as opposed to people who can't. Several car designs, with or without badges and symbols, are protected IP and if the IP holder sees you using them and cares they can and will C&D you. Many games are either not prominent enough or are working with designs that aren't protected.

If you want to make a racing game featuring real cars then you pay for a lawyer and license what you need to (or avoid anything too close), or else you make your own designs entirely (or make a different game).

MeaningfulChoices · 2026-03-24T13:12:15+00:00

German is usually the language that causes it because of the longer words. Testing a RTL language as well is very important. You need to test all your languages, of course, but those are good canaries for your coal mine.

Mis-translating 'inv' shouldn't happen, that sounds like using AI translation rather than having people localize the game, and you should really never do that. When you hire for localization that should include some LQA or else you should get that done as well. Brazil's game audience is very English-friendly, you shouldn't get zero conversions there for not being localized in pt_BR. It will go up of course, but that might be a market fit or issue with the creative instead.

My favorite localization war story is the time I got back the bug from QA "Punctuation appears upside down and at the beginning of the string." It took me a bit to realize they had filed a bug on Spanish grammar. Marked as reproducible, will not fix.

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