In these trying economic times, it is tempting to visit the website LinkedIn.com in search of gainful employment in the videogame business. On that dread portal one can find an endless parade of hucksters and hustlers promising they're guarding the secret to success: a guaranteed six-figure career is just one $299.99 seminar away!
Here on the trusty ship PC Gamer we make no such outlandish promises, instead offering more practical advice: How to get laid off from whatever games industry job you already have.
The array of techniques assembled below is so wide-ranging, we're confident that anyone—from an enthusiastic 23-year-old graduate just weeks into their dream role, to a 30-year veteran beloved for their unending willingness to share decades of accrued knowledge and experience—can find the path to joblessness that's just right for them.
With these tried and true methods, a little grit and plenty of hard work, you too will be able to join the ranks of the approximately 35,000 wondering if they'll be able to afford rent, provide for their families, or find fulfillment in their chosen craft, which generates well over $100 billion in revenue each year.
PC Gamer's definitive (but by no means exhaustive) list of ways to lose your job in the videogame industry—guaranteed!
- Work at a company whose "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger"
- Make a game that does so well that it's called a "break out hit" by the company that hired you to make it
- Work for a publisher that decides your game is dead less than three months after your boss insists "the game is absolutely not dying"
- Follow up a critically acclaimed game about skateboarding with a critically acclaimed game about rollerblading before your publisher decides it needs to "rationalize its pipeline"
- Make a game that doesn't do well, probably because of decisions made by your boss, boss's boss, and/or boss's boss's boss
- Help make a game as successful as Marvel Rivals, but as part of a team that does not fit into new plans for "optimized development efficiency"
- Work at a studio that gets acquired for over $60 billion dollars, none of which ends up in your pocket
- Endure executive pressure that forces your studio into making a game it isn't well-suited to (it is then shut down)
- Work at a studio that can't get funding despite being founded by an industry veteran
- Work at a company that needs to become more flexible/agile/versatile under these trying economic conditions. (Meanwhile, your CEO might've spent $2 million on vintage cars)
- Have a boss who wears a really bad hat on stage
- Go on strike because your bosses want you to train your AI replacement
- Fail to meet unrealistic sales expectations after your game has been de-prioritized and your studio mismanaged
- Get hoovered up by a company whose spending spree turns out to be reliant on Saudi Arabia forking out $2,000,000,000 (and then it doesn't do that)
- Believe a tech company that it's serious about funding games for its new platform that no one wants. (It will change its mind before you have enough time to finish a game)
- Have a boss who declares that a leak of "non-public information" about your in-development game was so dire, the whole studio's gotta go
- Uh oh, your CEO is high on AI! Should've seen that coming
- Write the best character in a long-running and much beloved RPG series
- Just, uh, write a character at all
- Have the hubris to try to make a videogame. What were you thinking?
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