Thoughts & Layers

Don't Get a Job in Video Games in 2025

Many articles, LinkedIn posts, and miscellanea have been written about how to get a job in video games – especially AAA. Don't. There's nothing good for you in this industry.

It is a sinking ship, and the people most enthralled by the idea of going down are the yes-men surrounding a bunch of delusional captains who think the ship is very impressive – it's the strongest it has been in years, it will never sink! This means you have to be a super yes-man to even compete.

The levels of investment are going down because the industry has been awful stewards of money, with even some big companies losing most of their investor money over the last 5 years. It turns out that paying high executive salaries straight from the pockets of investors, regardless of whether the games sell or not, was never a good long-term strategy.

So if we're being realistic, you probably won't get a job, not if you're a junior in the US or CANZUK, anyway. The good news is that you don't want a job in games. You may think you do, but you probably don't.

Do you have a pretty good intuition for what players want? Have you built fun games for your portfolio? Those skills will come in handy in an industry that actually cares about them. The video game industry is more about pitching crazy ideas and absorbing investment money. The player and fun don’t enter the loop much.

But what if you can’t do anything but games? What if games were your dream? In that case, you’ll love building games part-time while you work somewhere else that doesn’t cancel your projects and lay you off every few years. You will sleep soundly knowing that to build your dreams, you don’t need to navigate 10 layers of abusive office politics, and that you’ll be able to continue doing this into your 40s and 50s.

Do I hear you say you’ve put all this effort into a video game/computer science degree and you don’t want it to go to waste? Well, you’ll be happy to know that it would have gone to waste in games, as a degree was never a requirement. And even if you get into the industry, you could be doing something meaningful with those skills instead. Something that makes the world a better place, instead of making a publisher richer by building games the world doesn’t really want.

Well, you’ve gone all this way, you might think – might as well give it a shot. Yes! I think you should give it a shot. But cap it at 10, 20, 50, or 100 job applications that never led to speaking to a human – a little taste of the depersonalization and disgrace of working in games. Then go work anywhere else. And be proud that you have enough self-worth and ambition not to work in an industry known for exploiting its people until they burn out – or worse.

If you must feel like you must do something in games before you can give up – maybe you have a point to prove – then follow this simple 6-step plan for your very own day in the life of a game developer:

  1. 9 am – sign an NDA with a gag non-disparagement clause. Imagine 10 corporate lawyers would harass you if you ever said anything negative about this day.
  2. 10 am – time for a daily stand-up. Draw up a Kanban board and put some meaningless tasks on it related to extracting market value so a white man you never met gets his bonus. Now, listen to the news or some podcast for 1 hour – imagine this is people talking about their little squares they’re doing to make that one guy rich. At one point or another, say the words “Same as yesterday. No blockers.” out loud.
  3. 11 am – you have a meeting with ambitious people trying to prove points that have very little to do with the problems at hand. Usually it’s bikeshedding. This can be perfectly emulated by reading Reddit comments out loud.
  4. 2 pm – lunch for an hour.
  5. 3 pm – another meeting, same as 11 am.
  6. 5 pm – it’s time to code/draw/model/arrange levels. There’s not really enough time, so it looks like you’ll stay up late again. Here is where you apply your skills while dealing with adult responsibilities like groceries, home maintenance, health, and others – in between tasks.

Congratulations, now you are a bona fide AAA game developer. Repeat this for as many days as you want.

Then never work in this industry. Every day of your life is valuable. This means it actually has a value – a cost you pay for dedicating it toward one type of work or another. Make the work meaningful, make it healthy and dignified. Even if you want to make video games, don’t get a job in games.

Other, less snarky, encouragements you may be looking for: