How gaming can get back to balanced growth | The DeanBeat

This week, we had 42 sessions and 97 speakers at our GamesBeat Next 2024 event. And many of them spoke around our theme of getting the game industry back to growth. Thank you all for coming and listening.

David Glass and I came up with the theme months ago on the hope that the game industry, which has seen 2.5 years of layoffs (with 33,000 jobs eliminated), would return to growth. But during the course of the day-and-a-half event, I began to realize what it really meant.

During the Game Changers session (where we ended our conference with the announcement of the list of the top 25 game startups), Lightspeed partner Moritz Baier-Lentz asked me for a prediction of the future. And I said I wanted the game industry to get back to balanced growth.

Balanced growth

That means, of course, a return to revenue growth, where the numbers have good percentage growth year on year. I think we’ll easily accomplish that with big games in 2025 like Grand Theft Auto 6 coming from Rockstar Games. But that’s not all we need.

We also need balanced growth. If we grow industry revenues in 2024 and we also see layoffs of more than 13,000 people in gaming, that’s not balanced growth. Next year, we want to the see the industry return to revenue growth. But we also want to see hiring exceed firing. Amir Satvat, the quant who works for Tencent by day and helps people find jobs in his offtime (he has helped 2,800 people find jobs through his free online resources), has amassed so much data around job seekers that he can predict how the aggregate picture in game jobs is changing.

By December, Satvat predicts that hiring will exceed hiring during that month on a 60-day trailing basis for the first time in years. That’s a significant event and it would be wonderful if the crossover happens.

If there are just a thousand more layoffs this year, Satvat warns that the crossover could be delayed into next year. But in an industry that has 300,000 or so people, we want to see much more than just a return to more hiring. We would love to see the return of talent wars so that the people who want a career in games can make it happen on their terms.

Many of the people at GamesBeat Next were looking for jobs, and so were some of our speakers. In my fireside chat with him, Satvat calculated that more than 10,000 people are actively looking for work now, and 45% of them have been out of work for more than a year. The young folks who are getting out of college now with zero experience up to three years of experience have a 1% to 2% chance of finding a job in the next year. And there’s ageism too. Those 50 and older have the same 1% to 2% chance of finding a job in the coming year. Those figures show that games are a pretty brutal industry. It’s only through Satvat that we have transparency when it comes to job numbers.

We’re all of course fearful and hopeful of the impact that AI can bring to games. Many fear it will take away more jobs. Yet we are just beginning to see its magic happen. Electronic Arts brought EA Sports College Football back this year (after splitting with the longtime licensor NCAA) and it signed up more than 11,000 college athletes for its game. It was able to create the realistic likenesses of those players in the game in just three months, thanks in part to the efficiency of AI creation. Our AI and games panel moderated by Hilary Mason of Hidden Door focused on ethical AI.

I think we must embrace the future and use the technology that comes our way. Gaming has always done that, and it has usually benefited both developers and consumers. We don’t want to reject new technology because it might make the old ways of doing things obsolete. We want to see how it can enable young people to break into the industry more easily, or improve someone’s chances of finding meaningful work.

Balanced diversity

Another place where we need balance is with diversity. When gaming culture reaches its true dominance and the talent war finally comes back, we’ll need everyone who can help. Dametra Johnson-Martelli, corporate vice president of gaming consumer sales at Microsoft spoke with Rachel Kaser at our 9th Women in Gaming Breakfast about breaking into the best companies and remembering you’re there for a reason. You bring a unique perspective that the company; find your voice, throw your ideas out, be vocal and take your shot. You’ll find that you can make a difference.

Our Diversity in Gaming panel, led by Xsolla’s Bridget Stacy, featured similar sentiments from Sheloman Byrd, Jenny Xu and Jessica Murrey as they talked about what raising money is like for people of color in games. Somehow they overcame skepticism and animosity and managed to show their tenacity to overcome the odds and finally raise the money that they needed to get their dreams off the ground.

At our event, Shelby Moledina made a short film, Resting Pitch Face, about what it’s like for women to raise money from gaming VCs, and she made a standing-room-only crowd laugh at the dark comedy. And Amy Hennig and her team at Skydance made me chuckle as they discussed their “no-asshole” policy.

Johnson-Martelli said you’ll spend 90,000 working in your lifetime. Make sure you wind up in a place with the right culture and show people why you belong there. Microsoft’s motto is that when we all play, everybody wins. About 25% of gamers are BIPOC, Johnson-Martelli said, and the game industry cannot afford to forget about them as they desperately look for more players for their blockbuster games.

Balanced technology

Yes, we fear for our colleagues because of AI. And we know there are false gods in the hype cycles that generated a quick buck for those who don’t really believe in what they’re selling. For sure, we want to expose those frauds who take advantage of the cycles and the easily duped.

But as brutal as the industry and the cycles and the frauds can be, gaming is also so rewarding. We also want to make sure that we see real technology put to good use so that it enhances not only our efficiency but our creativity, with the result being that games of the future can ignite the minds of those who play them. If AI works, it means a company with 100 people might get by with only 10. But it also means that one person trying to break into games as an indie could possibly do the work of 10.

For sure, 2025 will have a lot of winners and losers. We saw solid growth this quarter in the results for Microsoft’s Xbox division and Electronic Arts’ earnings. But there are companies struggling out there, like Ubisoft, and it has more than 19,000 workers who are facing cost reductions. The picture is going to be mixed for a while, and we can only hope that those who see the way make the right decisions because there is so much at stake among those who are following them into battle.

And finally, as we noted in our sessions with Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, and Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash who coined the term the “metaverse,” we also want to see creativity and a return to the growth of our imaginations. Like these visionary seers, I want us to hear that word “metaverse” and think not of all the scams and duds that happened along the way, but the hope is that someday it will be a reality.

The metaverse should be a spatial expression of the internet, according to Stephenson and Sweeney, and the only way to build it is with open technology, not taxed by platforms that contribute nothing. And then it will help games, entertainment and all of the digital world grow to the next level.

Thank you

I don’t want to come off sounding like a carnival salesman. But we’re so glad you came and we hope you’ll come back.

A total of 577 people came through our event in the day and a half at the lovely Convene meeting place in San Francisco. That was more than the 550 who came last year, even though it has been such a tough year for game people. That means a lot to us.

Thank you all for coming. We appreciate your support and we like to pay it back. We had the support of generous sponsors, and we supported those in our GamesBeat community who needed discounts or free tickets to get into GamesBeat Next for free. We gave speaking roles to people who needed jobs. And I was thrilled to see so many people networking in our central spaces at the event at all hours of the day. We hope that good things come from that.

We hope that one day your startup or company could be one of our Game Changers one day and wind up on the Nasdaq Tower in Times Square. Or maybe show up on the Nasdaq Tower a second time as you launch your initial public offering.

We can dream. See you at the next one.