Times have changed a lot since Garry broke through with the infamous Garry's Mod. That's where I got my first taste of programming - writing a PID controller for a tank turret so I could point the tank's gun using my mouse.
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
And you're competing against games studios who spend millions on salaries for artists, engineers, designers, story writers to produce a game, and then spend 6x the salary cost again on marketing.
I spent 1000+ hours with Garry’s Mod/Wiremod/E2 and I definitely attribute some of my programming knowledge to it. It was in Gmod that I figured out how to draw a circle with sin/cos.
Another more constructive way to frame "de-professionalization" is "prosumerization", focusing more on the gain to consumers than the loss to professionals.
I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison).
We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release.
Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time).
Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools.
The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with.
Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex.
SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios:
A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games.
If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required.
Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now.
Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.
I think if you look at the larger numbers, there is more of a middle class of game devs than ever before, they just ALSO exist in the shadow of a set of large studios that are larger than ever before. I as a game player feel like I'm getting more "games for me" than ever, even though the games I enjoy fall pretty far out of the mainstream (Farm Together 2, Cat Quest 3, Quest Hunter, Slime Rancher 2, Factorio, Traveler's Rest, Satisfactory, many many more).
All of those are games made by "small to medium sized" studios and sold enough to support their team (maybe not Quest Hunter, as that's older). My point is that there's just SO MANY games that're just mid-size and floating along. Basically no one is getting RICH on game dev, but there's more folks making a living there than ever.
roblox is a good suggestion. i know it's often criticised, especially for its profit margins, but developers get a massive potential audience, free unlimited multiplayer hosting, and many monetisation streams with little setup.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
I worked on the software dev side in the games industry for years. I have never seen a worse time to be attempting to make a living doing that, it's pure madness. The endgame being pushed, and looking increasingly technically viable over a decade or so, is the user, holodeck style, describes what they want and it is assembled in front of them. There is a lot of cope in the games industry about this ever happening because of how disruptive it would be.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
For Roblox I haven't seen the returns getting smaller. I've had a bunch of smallish games there for a few years, and it has been stable.
While there is a ridiculous amount of competition, so far it has been offset by platform expansion. When I started in 2020 the whole platform had about 30M daily active users. Now over 110M. Maybe my share of plays has shrunk, but it's now from a much bigger pie.
(I don't know if this holds true generally or if my games have somehow persisted better than the average game)
He mentions s&dbox, his new engine/gmod spiritual successor. They maintain an interesting devblog over at https://sbox.game/news if you are interested in how the sausage is made.
Probably a bad idea to use that name considering https://sandbox.game have been around for over a decade now, and despite this week's management shake-up they still have about $300m in funds in the bank.
The article highlights how to get into the modding industry. While that is part of the games industry, it is a small fraction of the larger game production business.
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
He quickly mentioned it, but good god, coding for a game is the hardest thing ever in the field. If you are a good software engineer, there is a good chance you are a bad game dev. It's so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down, nothing works as you expected, and you have to learn so many things around coding (the engine itself, physics, texturing, modeling, lighting, etc.)
> It’s so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down
There’s a seed of truth here, but at the same time, I’ve heard this mostly from people who learned certain programming patterns in school or in enterprise application development, and never learned embedded systems engineering, or just plain didn’t start with game development.
You might be referring to issues with specific game engines, or you might be referring to writing only scripts and plugins for an existing game engine, as opposed to writing a game engine, I don’t know, but generally speaking game coding absolutely can and should be clean. It’s just a different kind of clean than you might expect, if you’re used to thinking in terms of C++ inheritance or functional programming or design patterns you learned elsewhere.
It's the opposite. What passes as "good engineers" nowadays is just mindless zombies that can be easily replaced by AI. Gamedev requires actual problem solving skills.
if I may offer some advice as game/engine programmer.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
This idea is extremely prevalent in the games industry and I'm really not a fan of it. It doesn't matter how good of a developer you are, what complicated projects you're working on or have shipped, if you don't have a portfolio of games you've made then you might as well not bother.
Which if you think about it is a real issue. Imagine applying at a courier company for a developer role and they keep asking you about the tracking software you've built, parcel measurement integration you've done etc., instead of asking you about your development skills. Having done those things is of course a huge bonus, but excluding 100% of people that don't have that experience excludes a great majority of candidates that could have been a great fit.
The problem is even bigger than that if I think about it. In this example they don't want to know about individual pieces of industry relevant software that you've built, they are expecting you to have shipped enterprise wide solutions that fit the criteria and that doesn't match your skillset. The role they're advertising might be a senior tech lead/developer, but you're not being hired as a programmer, you're being hired as a game maker. They want you for the games you've shipped, not for the code you've written.
Does your little games have "juice"? That's going to get you hired 100%, but mainly because of your skills as a designer, artist, tester, audio engineer etc., coding only made up 20% of that package.
One esoteric route would be to try and specialize in an area where talent is scarce. There's a lot of gameplay programmers, few engine programmers, fewer graphics programmers, and very few physics programmers (in my experience at least).
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition.
If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
This is brutal but accurate. I have heard from authors that get asked by publishers what their X and Instagram follower counts are before they're even considered.
Being able to connect to an audience is becoming absolutely everything.
people say that its hard to stand out with a game. theyve been saying this since 2013. if you look at the vast, vast majority of games they almost try purposefully to be bad. they blatantly ignore users and entertain their own fantasies about what is fun and what is not. if you make a game that is clean, simple, straightforward and thoughtful then your game will be good. exceedingly few games manage to do this and never even tried to.
i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition
Yeah, you'll see people pointing to statistics like how many games are being released on Steam nowadays. But if you actually sort by new on Steam, and look at the quality of these games, it's 95% complete low-effort trash: gacha games, published Unreal templates with some tweaks, half-baked ideas, just stuff that no one would ever actually want to play.
If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.
I worked for a studio for about half a year. You have to be willing to completely enslave yourself if you want to go down that path and succeed. Making an impact in a AAA studio (or one of their contractors) requires fairly extreme output on a constant basis.
The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.
I have decades+ in the American games industry. Bluntly speaking: don't join it. There are too many people chasing diminishing, shrinking (relative) job counts; large studios are offshoring more and more of their work; funding has dried up and we don't see the light at the end of the tunnel; there are too many games.
Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States.
The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States.
The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable.
Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up.
Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly.
Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior.
//edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them.
A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue.
At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output.
A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.
36 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 66.3 ms ] thread1) Yes, learn to program.
2) Yes, learn 3d art.
3) Enthusiastically do those things almost every day of your life.
4) Don't follow too many tutorials, just enough to unblock you.
5) Let the debugger/screen punch you in the face. Learn to love being told when you are wrong.
6) Keep your expenses low, but probably you still need to go to a relatively good college.
7) Why? That's because a large part of our world is based on needless credentialism.
8) Build tools that people literally use. This is how you know you're ready for interviewing.
9) Grind leetcode and brain teasers and common interview gotchas for your language/domain of choice, but only an hour a day max.
That's basically what it takes to get a real and good job in the industry now. No magic bullets, just hard work and acceptance of some arbitrary BS.
Today, it's easier than ever to get started making games (even I can do it! [0]) but standing out in a crowded marketplace is very difficult. The music industry saw a very similar trend about 10-15 years ago, with the release of consumer recording equipment. In both cases it lead to a 'de-professionalization' of the industry, where most participants are amateurs but most of the success still goes to established studios - barring one-in-a-million outliers such as Garry's Mod, or other indie darlings like Hollow Knight, Balatro, Stardew Valley.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3627290/Botnet_of_Ares/
I was lucky to work on a AAA game called The Sims from 1997-2000, at the end of the era when a small team could make a product like that (the teams for The Sims 2-4 were enormous in comparison).
We didn't have the resources to ship a demo, so instead we focused on creating tools for user created content, releasing "SimShow" before the game was released to enable users to create and preview skins, so after it was released there was already a big collection of skins available (many that we could not have published ourselves like the Star Trek skins). So the fans were already producing content and sharing them on web sites themselves, before the release.
https://tcrf.net/Proto:The_Sims_(Windows)/SimShow
https://archive.org/details/sim-show
Then we released "Transmogrifier" to make custom objects, which was widely accessible because it only required inexpensive easy to use tools like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, instead of requiring expensive and enormously difficult to use 3D editor tools like 3D Studio Max (Blender wasn't an option at the time).
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Transmogrifier
https://www.thesimstransmogrifier.com/TransmogrifierDocument...
Yahoo Groups were instrumental in enabling fans (kids, adults, even elderly) to make objects, share them, and help each other learn how to use the tools.
The great thing is that Sims mods gave people a purpose and motivation to learn powerful tools that would serve them well in many other aspects of life. I knew a grandmother who learned to use Photoshop just to make furniture for her grandchildren to play with.
Will Wright talks about the interrelationships of tool builders, content artists, web masters, story creators, collectors, browsers, and casual players, and organizes them into an ecological pyramid with many casual players at the base, then fewer collectors/browsers, storytellers, content artists, webmasters, and finally a few toolmakers at the apex.
SimFreak and SimSlice are a couple of prolific successful webmasters and toolmakers who met through the Sims community and got married, and are still producing some of the most amazing collections of integrated Sims objects like ZombieSims, and also working on projects with Will Wright's Gallium Studios:
https://simfreaks.com/
https://simslice.com/
https://zombiesims.com/
https://thealveys.us/
Will Wright on designing user interfaces to simulation games (1996) (donhopkins.medium.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34573406
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
Will Wright's Des...
You don’t need a feedback loop here.
A more positive way of framing it is that it has never been easier to make properly produced music/games.
If you have a lot of free time on your hands and want to make a good looking game today, you will have all the tools you need to do so and absolutely nothing stopping you from making something great. No capital required.
Obviously, it means that the field is now very crowded so if you want to live from it you will need to stand out a lot. But the activity in itself has never been more accessible than now.
Amusingly, it means the easiest way to enter the video game industry nowadays is probably just making games. This equally applies to music and video by the way. In all likelihood, people will fail to turn it into a job, but the entry cost has never been this low.
All of those are games made by "small to medium sized" studios and sold enough to support their team (maybe not Quest Hunter, as that's older). My point is that there's just SO MANY games that're just mid-size and floating along. Basically no one is getting RICH on game dev, but there's more folks making a living there than ever.
the company could definitely do with better PR, and their child safety features are good but not perfect by any means. i'd still say it's a good choice if you're trying to make a game easily and quickly
disclaimer: i've made money from Roblox's DevEx program
Anyway....it looks pretty neat. I feel like the industry as gone from a time of mods, through an era of AAA unmoddable games, and now we're landing on "all games will be mods.". I guess we're chasing Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite models now.
In the mean time as others have mentioned I know people, industry pros, that make money on Roblox and UEFN. The valuable part is a talent for creating gameplay systems, which is not in any way related to low level programming or rendering algorithms, then you stand at least a small chance, but due to how crowded the market is the returns on this get smaller every day.
To anyone wanting to make a living from the games industry I would advise simply going outside and doing something else.
Edit to add: I have noticed than when I started in games over twenty years ago people knew hard work was involved. These days if you tell people you work in games you are met with a response that you basically play all the time and are not serious, and to some extent this reflects the changing nature of most of the work being done in that period.
While there is a ridiculous amount of competition, so far it has been offset by platform expansion. When I started in 2020 the whole platform had about 30M daily active users. Now over 110M. Maybe my share of plays has shrunk, but it's now from a much bigger pie.
(I don't know if this holds true generally or if my games have somehow persisted better than the average game)
I've hired many game programmers and the key to getting into the industry is demonstrating a few critical skills:
1. Sufficient technical skill in whatever your field is.
2. Curiosity applied to problem solving. How can we make this work?
3. An ability to finish what you start. Get it done.
If you're a new programmer looking to start out on this journey, I recommend picking an engine and just start making stuff. Participate in as many Gamejams, Mods or minigame productions as possible. Ship things; Finish them. Then, when you're interviewing for a 'real' game job, you will have some experience to share and discuss.
For technical candidates, there's a minimum threshold that you must cross to be considered. For programmers, it's often C++. So learn the basics, get proficient, use the tools. Read the books on programming interviews and learn the types of things that are expected.
There’s a seed of truth here, but at the same time, I’ve heard this mostly from people who learned certain programming patterns in school or in enterprise application development, and never learned embedded systems engineering, or just plain didn’t start with game development.
You might be referring to issues with specific game engines, or you might be referring to writing only scripts and plugins for an existing game engine, as opposed to writing a game engine, I don’t know, but generally speaking game coding absolutely can and should be clean. It’s just a different kind of clean than you might expect, if you’re used to thinking in terms of C++ inheritance or functional programming or design patterns you learned elsewhere.
If you want to get hired at a company as a programmer, make really really small things, like tiny games. I am talking start with hangman, then sudoku in the console. Then move on to minesweeper and tetris. If confident do space invaders. At this point maybe get started with 3D? Maybe Unity and Unreal?
There's SO much stuff you'll learn making those games. Maybe you end up making a fancy menu, or adding sound effects. Maybe you come up with some basic particle effects. It doesn't really matter, what matters is you went through it and have something to show.
Don't get side tracked with big projects and trying to be a designer at the same time. Keep it small.
If I am interviewing you and see some solid and polished small games and we can talk about stuff you found cool you're already punching way above most entry level coders.
Which if you think about it is a real issue. Imagine applying at a courier company for a developer role and they keep asking you about the tracking software you've built, parcel measurement integration you've done etc., instead of asking you about your development skills. Having done those things is of course a huge bonus, but excluding 100% of people that don't have that experience excludes a great majority of candidates that could have been a great fit.
The problem is even bigger than that if I think about it. In this example they don't want to know about individual pieces of industry relevant software that you've built, they are expecting you to have shipped enterprise wide solutions that fit the criteria and that doesn't match your skillset. The role they're advertising might be a senior tech lead/developer, but you're not being hired as a programmer, you're being hired as a game maker. They want you for the games you've shipped, not for the code you've written.
Does your little games have "juice"? That's going to get you hired 100%, but mainly because of your skills as a designer, artist, tester, audio engineer etc., coding only made up 20% of that package.
As such you could try to specialize in this area (collision detection, ray queries, rigid body simulation, constraints, solvers, softbody sim, fluid sim etc.). Of course this isn't for everyone as it requires skills and interest in: low level concurrent programming, maths/linear algebra and physical behavior intuition. If you do find these topics fascinating and can demonstrate some ability in them, your skills will certainly be in demand.
https://youtube.com/@chriswilsonvideos?si=qD1rbztnI0nY7pDf
Definitely a controversial question in this economy.
My best advice for today:
Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online.
If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job.
In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn.
It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”.
So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.
Being able to connect to an audience is becoming absolutely everything.
i have a hobby of watching movies. i watch a new movie, new to me, almost every other day. after doing this for years i can tell you something: the vast, vast majority of movies made before 2010 were horrible. almost every movie ever produced has at least one glaring flaw that could have easily been fixed. but the idiot at the helm entertained delusions about their crappy writing being interesting. this was all before netflix slop and AI slop… it was all professionals. there is something deeper at play here than indie devs. if you can actually have a rational, clear and accurate opinion about what makes something good then your game will are better than 99% of your competition
If you have taste, drive, and vision, your actual competition is miniscule. Marketing and whatnot can still be a challenge, but it's not an insurmountable wall if you have the patience to climb it. And if you ever feel lost, you'll be hard pressed to find a group more ready to dispense advice than game developers.
The only alternative is to have enough runway to quit your day job and self-publish a game to steam. The biggest problem with this (beyond the money) is having a game concept that is marketable in 2025. If you have both the money and a good gameplay mechanic in mind, this would be the most sustainable path. Setting your own schedule makes all the difference if you can afford to.
Are you from the UK or Europe? Have at it! American game jobs are quickly relocating to those cheaper places. If you are from the US, the costs have gotten too high and the pressure is massive to reduce those costs: large projects are seeing an increasing percentage of the total number of people on the project be from partners outside the States.
The trend is bottom-up: outsourcing partners are providing cheaper staffing starting at the bottom of the org chart, steadily going up said chart. The growing desire to have a smaller primary-studio footprint means more outsourcing in general. A desire to cut costs means more and more of that outsourcing is going to cheaper locals. Often, the majority of people who work on a game are not from the "parent" company - and a quickly growing percentage of those are not in the States.
The model that we are slowly converging on, bit by bit, is maybe 20-30 percent "home studio" in the States, with the rest being partners from non-American, cheaper areas. The pressure that drives this is massive and inexorable.
Some of this came from the lead up to, and the full stretch of, the covid years: up until just a couple years ago, it was quite difficult for an American studio to hire staff - it was a wonderful time to be looking for a job, and salaries for non-engineers (who were cheaper) rapidly went up.
Now we are in a situation where the costs are just too high, so the pressure has mounted to manage those costs. Outsourcing to cheaper areas is the solution, and the pace is increasing significantly.
Again, if you are an American interested in the games industry: don't do it. It has become deeply unreliable and unstable for anyone who isn't quite senior.
//edit - i have more thoughts. These will be deeply unpopular, but I feel compelled to express them.
A well-intentioned union drive in the popular press (a great idea when focused on bottom-of-the-heap, poorly-treated QA teams) accelerated annoyance with American development teams by studio and publisher leadership, leading to more exasperation-driven offshoring. I don't have a strong opinion on this topic, but I have to admit to myself it is a real issue.
At many American studios, covid-era hiring goals changed in a way that placed value on things other than immediate raw skill - instead favoring a more holistic stance on staffing. This was an approachable concept during ZIRP, when funding was more generous, but has put studios in a tough position in the new era of an absolutely brutal filter of pure output.
A passionately-defended work from home thing means that, just as everyone predicted during covid, studio leadership has realized that if they forego the power of intense in-office collaboration, why not just remote those remote jobs to cheaper places? After all, west coast studios still get a couple hours overlap with UK development teams: get better at slightly out of sync development, and suddenly US-timezone jobs don't seem as massively necessary as they once appeared.