Although the game industry has had plenty of layoffs this year, a new survey shows that the employee count at video game companies in North America rose slightly this year.
The employee count rose to 44,806, up marginally from 44,400 a year ago, in the third annual survey by Game Developer Research. The job losses related to closures of studios in the traditional game industry were offset by a rise in hiring at social and online gaming studios. Also, the pro-game policies of the Canadian government have helped subsidize the creation of jobs at Canadian game studios.
Canadian companies grew explosively, with the total employee count rising 30 percent. That’s due in part to the success of companies such as France’s Ubisoft, which has huge studios in Montreal and is adding more people in Toronto. Other companies have lots of employees in Vancouver. Total Canadian game employment rose from 9,500 to 12,480. It’s worth noting that the U.S. government and states ought to offer their own incentives to keep jobs in the U.S., or they’ll face a big migration of jobs to the north.
In the U.S., California has the most game jobs, with 20,815 developers employed in the state. Washington is second with 4,500 employees, and Texas is third with 2,600. New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida and Maryland also have more than 1,000 game professionals working in them.
Not included in the current census estimate are game tools companies, game contracting/services companies, external public relations, marketing, legal, and other business services, and liaison or licensing divisions at larger media companies. Game Developer Research estimates these positions account for 18,000 jobs across North America.
As we noted in our story last week, the job outlook has been grim. Last year, after the financial crisis struck and the recession set in, game publishers shut more than 60 development studios and publicly announced cuts of more than 8,452 jobs during the second half of 2008 and in the early part of 2009. That was an estimated 12 percent of the industry, according to analyst Wanda Meloni of M2 Research.
Since that time, Meloni said there have been an additional 2200 layoffs, mostly occurring between October 2009 and December 2009. There were also three more game studio closures, bringing the total number closed this year to 15.
The census report lists more than 700 companies in the U.S. and Canada, with market focus ranging from mobile games to console games and everything in between. Game Developer Research is a division of the Think Services Game Group, which puts on events such as the Game Develpers Conference.