Amir Satvat received the first-ever Game Changers award today from The Game Awards for his working in finding jobs for people in the game industry through his game job resources.
It’s well-deserved recognition at a time when transparency and emotional support are needed to help those that have been affected by unprecedent job losses in gaming. No one has done more to help people find jobs efficiently than Satvat. It’s nice to see him get noticed by Geoff Keighley, creator of The Game Awards, with more than 100 million gamers watching. Satvat is the first-ever Game Changer for The Game Awards.
When I interviewed Satvat for the first time in August 2023, he had helped more than 450 people find jobs through his do-it-yourself job listing service and resources on LinkedIn. Now, as the game industry has seen 34,000 layoffs in the last 2.5 years, Satvat has helped nearly 3,000 people find jobs. Making the best use of the people gaming already has is the path to balanced growth in gaming.
“You can’t make great games without great people,” Satvat said as he accepted the award. To game developers, he said, “I see you.”
Much of the turmoil started in November 2022, as Meta and other huge companies laid off tens of thousands of people. As Satvat was grieving for those who were getting bad news right before the holidays, he poured more of his off-work time into making automated spreadsheets and data collection to do something for those people.
“I felt so bad because it had been before Thanksgiving, and it was really before the really heavy layoffs came,” Satvat said in our first interview. “We were sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner. And I started hearing about friends getting laid off. And I said this was unacceptable to my wife. And that was kind of the genesis.”
He added, “We see the numbers and it’s tempting sometimes to forget that it’s real people. And eventually, as the numbers get bigger and bigger, you just can’t stop paying attention. My friends wished for something that made it easy to browse for jobs. I thought, ‘I’m pretty good at Excel macros, and web scraping. I could write something that does that.’”
Now, Satvat has produced so much data about the gaming industry, aggregated from the people who have shared their job search efforts with him. He broke into games himself in his late 30s, and by that time, he had real skills with data. He started his community with one resource.
Tens of thousands of game job listings
Satvat puts together lists that were automatically updated with the latest job openings at thousands of game companies around the world. He “scraped” the job listings and embedded them in an easy-to-use Google Sheet and posted it on his LinkedIn page. Soon enough, he had hundreds of listings of fresh jobs, and he rotated listings that were a month old. Satvat has been able to come with data on ageism in games, the time it takes people to find game jobs, and even predict when the job market might turn around.
If you stop and think about that, nobody does this, except professional job recruiters who are paid handsomely in good times to fill tons of jobs at fast-growing companies. During an economic downturn, nobody does this out of the goodness of their hearts or for free. This work made Satvat into a kind of celebrity on LinkedIn, and they gave him the honor of being a “Top Voice” for contributions he made in the realm of video games. He has grown from 4,000 or so followers and friends to over 100,000.
He figured he could aggregate jobs for people, making job hunting easier. It turns out this worked.
“I’ve often thought that a lot of the things that can be the most powerful are things that are simple,” he said. “People over-engineer things. I noticed there are a lot of sites to help people, but there are maybe 100 sign-ons that you do. Or you have to go to a portal and look at databases. I bet I could just put something like Google Sheets up and make it easy. People will use it. That ended up being true.”
In a post, he celebrated, saying, “This is the pinnacle for me. My lifelong aspiration has been to become a trusted member of the video games community, to have a voice that resonates with people and garners and earns their time and respect.”
Breaking into games
This worked tapped his skills, but it was completely outside his work. He was in the startup division at Amazon, assisting companies with Amazon Web Services in the cloud sales center. He had been there four years and had a stint in the games division. At Tencent, he is starting anew, tapping into his training in business development and strategy.
He got an MBA in grad school and degrees in policy and engineering. He worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs. He was in his mid-30s before he broke into games. The new side hobby made him think about his own career goals, and he decided to move back into games.
As for the Game Jobs Workbook, he added new pieces to it, like getting people to sign up to be mentors and have 30-minute conversations with people who ask for the help. Recruiters and hiring managers are proactively getting in touch with Satvat to list jobs. And he has also added a separate network of many people who have volunteered to read resumes and help people improve them.
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