How many people work in the game industry? | Two different views

Amir Satvat, the game job champion, estimated recently that about 230,000 people work in the game industry. That sounded low to Kenn White, one of the leaders of the Game Industry Coffee Chat. So White’s crew dug into the numbers on their own and came up with their own defensible estimate of 740,000 to 900,000.

White, a longtime game developer, said in a LinkedIn post that the median number of their estimates (ranging from low end to high end) is 833,000 game industry employees across more than 25,000 companies. That sounds a lot more impressive, but it’s such a wide variation compared to Satvat’s bottoms-up estimate. Satvat raised his estimate to about 350,000, based on his own analysis of White’s information, but the two sides still remain pretty far apart for people directly employed in games.