In the past three years, Amir Satvat has become a game jobs champion and an authority on transparency on getting a job in the game industry. He talked with Dean Takahashi, editorial director of GamesBeat, about the state of jobs in gaming.
By day, he’s a business development director at Tencent. But in his spare time, he has amassed job data on openings, layoffs and more for more than 5,000 companies in the game industry.
Using anonymized data from that research, he has been able to come up with the hiring and firing trends in the overall game industry and in regions of the world. I caught up with him in an interview for The BIG Show during our Hollywood & Games event during December.
Since that time, Satvat has changed the name of his community from the Amir Satvat Games Community to Always Supporting the Games Community (ASGC). He also published his own predictions for a better year for game jobs in 2026, and he provided some data that showed that California and North America were the hardest hit by layoffs around the world. In fact, California accounted for 47% of game layoffs in 2025.
The ASGC has become the largest grassroots support organization for people in the game indsutry. For this selfless work, Satvat was awarded the first ever Game Changers Award at The Game Awards in 2024 — a show that was viewed 154 million viewers around the world. I asked Satvat how he felt about that.
He said it was surreal and that he owed so much to so many people in the community who have helped him with his work on his web site and LinkedIn posts. Those people want to help Satvat find jobs in games for those out of work, and Satvat’s data shows that more than 4,400 people have gotten jobs using his data, and more than 86,000 conversations have taken place using his resources for mentoring sessions.
Over time, this data has encouraged people to learn how to find jobs and to understand their options given their levels of experience or specialization in the industry. For instance, sometimes people should travel to another place to improve their chances of getting a certain kind of work. Or they should perhaps try adjacent work that requires the same skills. They can get some of that data from Satvat’s research.
That research has earned Satvat more than six million viewers in the past three years, as well as 140,000 followers on LinkedIn and 500,000 unique monthly visitors.
Satvat said the roots of this research go back to his own unconventional entry into games. He grew up with games and loved playing them and wanted to work in games. But he was based in the Northeastern U.S. and wanted to stay there for family reasons. So it wasn’t until he was 38 years old that he got the first opportunity to work in games.
“Until you know how to put all these building blocks together, it can feel foreign and feel impossible” to get a job in games, he said. “Beyond just a standpoint of human empathy, my own struggles and learnings from what I had to do to break into the industry, I never wanted anyone to feel like they were alone and having to do it all over again like
I did.”
I hope you enjoy the conversation that I had with Satvat, who has been a regular speaker at our GamesBeat events, and I expect many more conversations with him to follow.
To listen to the full chat, listen above — or click here to watch a video recording. Stay tuned for more episodes, including additional episodes recorded at GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games summit last month, as well as a full season rollout later this year.