The "deprofessionalization" of the gaming industry - article

Or perhaps more aptly the "decorporatization", as one Youtube user phrased it:

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Seems like we're entering a new phase in this industry and some are realizing it:

Article:
At a Glance
  • The success of Schedule I, R.E.P.O, and Balatro has shown games by small or solo teams can outperform expensive competitors.
  • Some say this points to games requiring fewer developers to be successful, leading to "deprofessionalization."
  • Small teams deserve success—but "deprofessionalization" risks damaging the industry.
This was easy to see at PAX East. At DICE and GDC this year I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine: "deprofessionalization." As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios struggling to drive sales, and the outsized success of some solo developers and small teams. These three forces, he argues, will combine to "drive career professionals from the traditional, professionalized side of the games industry." "Some of these people will decide to go indie," he continues. "Others will leave gaming altogether. And in between there's a vast spectrum of irregular working arrangements available." Is this trend real?

It sure felt so at PAX East 2025. It's no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic led to many game companies decamping from expo floors, retreating to either all-online promotion or in-person community meetups structured around intermittent panels. Gone are the days where a chunk of the development team can get one-on-one facetime with players—shifts in supply and demand have simply moved where marketing takes place. But something else lurked under the surface. Some notable studios like Behaviour Interactive and Funcom had classic booths up on the show floor. Devolver Digital had maybe the tallest booth on display—but it was only using it to showcase three games: Mycopunk, Monster Train 2, and Botsu. The bulk of the remaining space was taken up by small publishers and game studios.

Wandering through these booths, I found a mix of truly excellent and inspiring games. But also found myself bubbling with frustration. Few of the developers on display were working on teams larger than three people. They talked about publishers wanting ever-more-expensive offerings as part of their pitch deck. Short-term contractors seemed to be the best way to plug gaps. Why did it feel like so few proper businesses were fighting to get their games in front of players at PAX? Speaking with Rigney and other developers, I sensed that "deprofessionalization" isn't just a catchy phrase to describe demand-side economics in game industry hiring. It's a frustrating reality that may undervalue games from big and small teams alike. Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor Rigney offered some extra nuance on his "deprofessionalization" theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be "the first" on the chopping block, followed by "roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they're not)."

"The winners will be the creative renegades. I'm talking about the people making work that would have never gotten greenlit at one of these bigger publishers in the first place. Some of these creatives will start their own studio, or dabble in side projects...This is the only creative industry on the planet where one person can make $100 million making something by themselves." That held up in my survey of the games boothing at PAX. The developers of Mycopunk and Cat Secretary had some of the larger teams on the floor of about 5-6 people. Indie publisher Playism was showing off a number of excellent-looking games like Mind Diver and Break Arts III. Executive producer Shunji Mizutani told me the average team size the company is looking to back is around 1-3 developers (though he said it's not a hard and fast rule). My favorite game I saw, We Harvest Shadows is being developed by The First Tree solo developer David Wehle. Wehle explained that he's hiring a contract coder to help with the dense system design fueling the "farming" part of his "horror farming simulator." The story was the same everywhere I went. Solo devs, two-person teams, and publishers fishing for low-budget indie hits were the talk of the show.

I want to be clear here—no one I spoke with at PAX East should feel "obligated" to give anyone a job. They're small teams making the most of limited resources, and it's the acceleration in game development technology that's made it possible. What feels wrong is how few people seem to benefit from this status quo. The show floor for PAX East 2025. The largest booth is a cloth dome for Elden Ring Nightreign.

(...)

To go back to Rigney for a moment, his key example of a post-deprofessionalization game developer is veteran developer Aaron Rutledge, a former lead designer on League of Legends, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and Apex Legends. After leaving Respawn Entertainment in 2024 he founded a consultancy firm Area Denial, acting as a "gun for hire" for studios. Rutledge deserves his success, and the life of a traveling creative called on by other studios sounds romantic. But as a foundation for game development, it's a framework that celebrates the few over the many. It narrows which roles are considered "essential" for making great games (often designers or programmers) and treats other positions as somehow less essential. You could see someone like Wehle hiring someone like Rutledge to bring some of that triple-A experience to a small game. But that feels like the polar ends of who can benefit in the deprofessionalized world—developers with the stability to swing big for big-shot ideas, and programmers or designers with deep career experience that can be called in like a group of noble mercenaries. People in between will be left out. Who gets left behind in a world mainly filled with small teams? My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music.

These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were the roles developers mentioned doing in some kind of shared or joint fashion. All three risk compartmentalization as "asset creators," their work treated as products you can purchase off the store shelf. Every artist in games knows how hard it is to make a living doing what you love. In-house artist positions have faded away as companies look overseas to produce as many assets as humanly possible at the lowest living wage. Enthusiasm for AI-generated assets (that look like dogshit) are nudging this trend along. In the "gun for hire" mindset, working artists aren't worth anything to game development because they're producing goods to be used, not participants in the process. Art directors are in a slightly more stable position, but only by virtue of knowing "what looks good" and telling someone else what they want to do. As someone who recently shipped his second game as a writer, the cuts to game narrative teams hit close to home. The GDC 2025 State of the Industry survey reported that of the 11 percent of developers laid off in the last year, 19 percent of them worked in game narrative, the highest of any responding demographic. Two diverging trends are hurting this field: the growth of successful games that don't feature much narrative (either focusing on deep game mechanics or story-lite multiplayer) and the spread of story-driven games authored by the creative director and maybe one or two collaborators create conditions that lower the number of available jobs. A Sandworm from Dune Awakening, in front of a sign for the game.

(...)

Game writers have long described frustration with how they're treated by the industry, often brought in later in the process and sometimes treated as if they lie in opposition to the rest of the development team. Some studios leaned on the job title of "narrative designer" for professionals who write and implement narrative events, but that still speaks to a mistrust of the profession, that producing words isn't enough to bring value to a team. Finally, game audio and music professionals both produce work that can be bundled into licensable libraries, with implementation left to designers on a team. Sometimes this work is essential, the number of sounds a game needs can't be produced by an individual human. And composers don't always want to be tied to one studio—working with multiple teams frees them to explore creative projects and keep working when they aren't necessarily needed in a day-to-day game development environment. But again, treating them this way puts them on the rim of the game development wheel, implying their labor could be deprioritized by true talent that deserves to reap the benefits of game design. A decentralized creative community needs to benefit creatives Rigney explained to me that the game industry has one ace up its sleeve that other creative fields don't: its "indie" market is a commercially viable market. "People are paying for these games!," he exclaimed. "This is not happening for indie filmmakers. This isn't happening for books. What's happening for indie games and small studios won't replace the jobs lost at the major publishers, but it will create opportunity for the most creative and most determined people." But don't rush off to start your indie dreams—it's still as true as it was for years that most indie games do not succeed. And those that don't succeed can still be financial fodder for the shovel merchants of the worlds—your technology companies, your payment processors, your game platforms, your investors, etc. Plenty of companies are standing ready to profit on the devs gunning to be the next Schedule I.

Is there a way deprofessionalization can benefit the developers left behind? Rigney raised one fair point: part of the reason some indies are running circles around large companies is that those companies can mismanage creatives so badly they go for years without shipping a game. If someone smart could crack that problem—improve management at large organizations and make sure games make it out the door—that could be a way to balance the trend. "Right now none of the solutions are well equipped to solve all the problems. I work in venture capital, which isn't great for funding individual games, but can work well when funding teams that are pursuing large scale growth via some new distribution or technological edge." Indeed, PAX East showed that we need creative solutions. One shouldn't need to be a social media wunderkind, a triple-A veteran with years of hard-to-earn experience, or a jack-of-all-trades to have a career in game development. That path does bring us some wildly inventive games—but leaves us with a community of developers hustling on gig work to keep their dream alive.


"Deprofessionalization risks damaging the industry"... It seems like some "professional" gaming media people forgot how this entire hobby and industry started out. It didn't originate through "specialist" teams consisting of 100+ people that's for certain.

Legendary drops did a response and commentary video about the article and topic, titled "Indie games are the enemy now":

 
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I cant wait to see the industry crumble. Sorry not sorry.

You know what's damaging to the industry? Firing thousands of people every year.

Boo hoo marketing positions will be the first ones to be gone. Yeah, because they're not fucking needed. At least not to that extent. Big scale marketing does not work for video games. Video Games are a hobby of people who are on the internet. Almost all of them. No amount of times square billboards, posters in big cities and super bowl ads are gonna make your shitty game a huge success. And games with zero marketing can easily outperform you because their good and word of mouth spreads like wild fire. Word of mouth is the best marketing in gaming in 2025. Which means that the solution for your game to be a huge success, is to make a good game.

And a good game is not guaranteed to go viral, that's true. But is it really in this case? Like small games can go under the radar. But is a Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft game gonna go under the radar? No, people will know about those games without the marketing. You have GUARANTEED word of mouth. For better or worse.

AND we know you love to sell advanced access now to make a few more bucks but that isn't doing you any favors either. You have established IP's that some people would pre order to play, without knowing if it's good. But now you make one of those and it's shit, and you sold advanced access, and now you have a lot of people 3 days before release showing the whole game and saying it's shit? Guess i'll cancel my pre order.
 
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Used to feel good about video games going main stream. It's the worst thing that could have happened to our hobby imo.

Game prices increasing across the board, whilst quality is mostly going down. Physical discs containing 85mb of data and the game has to be downloaded from servers for single player games. Over blown budgets mostly due to marketing.

Smaller teams are starting to birth better games than huge AAA studios. If a reset or change/s is going to happen to the gaming industry, at this stage I cannot wait for it to start.
 
Didn't read the whole thing
But what did they meant "outperform"
Balatro sold 5 mil, which is impressive number if we don't look at price. Total revenue was 75 mil from sales or about 50 mil for developer
Big number for one person, but not that big for one game. And even to get this results dev should be extremely lucky, thousands fail before one succeed

It's a nice addition and a way to elevate from small to medium or even big, but it's alone wouldn't sustain industry
 
Why did it feel like so few proper businesses were fighting to get their games in front of players at PAX?

What the fuck is a "proper" business? Why is he being so condescending towards smaller businesses and those who rely on contractors/outsourcing to deliver quality work?

As somebody who runs two tech businesses which both heavily rely on outsourcing to do what we do, this article is abhorrent as far as I'm concerned. Regardless of industry, businesses have zero obligation to hire people on a full time in-house basis - the obligation is to deliver quality work and deliver what the customer wants. If you can do that, both better and more efficiently than a huge industry player who employs hundreds, if not thousands, of employees then why is that an indictment of you and not of the huge inefficient company which is doing nothing more than wasting the money and resources at their disposal?

If jobs are being "lost" in all of this then maybe the industry never needed all those "jobs" in the first place.
 
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so.... generalist will make good enough things + AI/"tools" (engines-tech) = compete in the same realm as massive AAA studios. but in general, competition will increase exponentially as well as the quality expected.... i mean nothing new...but let's see how much the "productivity, scope and creativity" is executed going forward.
 
But there's a lot more than just killing in videogames. If you pull killing out of R* games, Take 2 will get cooked. The demographic here doesn't represent the future of this industry, and definitely not meaningful or valuable to make new IPs by any stretch of imagination.
 
Interestingly, OP appears to take the narrative into a different dumber direction than the intentions of the author. Do we really need to dumb this topic down to be able to discuss it?

What can we do to improve mismanagement of some bigger studios like Ubisoft. I mean, Rockstar seems to be able to do it well..
 
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Too many big studios are bloated with useless "consultants" and middle management, that only serve to waste money and slow down development.
 
Interestingly, OP appears to take the narrative into a different dumber direction than the intentions of the author.
If you say so. I just tried to suggest video games used to be small passion projects mainly developed solo or by a small pack of bedroom programmers back in its heyday implying we may be coming back full circle to that.
 
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"Indie" games need investors too. They do also use specialists but they are hired guns not full time employees. Indie does provide opportunities for writers or journalists looking to take a larger role in smaller projects but those writers cannot be bums who only care about their own narrow interests and whose main talent is towing the line, biding their time, and accommodating the corporate girth.
 
If you say so. I just tried to suggest video games used to be small passion projects mainly developed solo or by a small pack of bedroom programmers back in its hayday implying we may be coming back full circle to that.
Full circle is a related fuzzy notion. The article is from the perspective of a developer who's worried about fewer career opportunities and is suggesting that some bigger studios need to change their ways.

I mean, I can see studios becoming smaller as less people are needed. In that case I share the author's worries (if I was a game developer). But as a consumer I don't give a fuck whether GTAVI is made by one developer or 2 000.


(btw, if I misinterpreted you and my language was too harsh, I apologize, I'm not perfect)
 
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Full circle is a related fuzzy notion. The article is from the perspective of a developer who's worried about fewer career opportunities and is suggesting that some bigger studios need to change their ways.
This is something that a lot of us are missing here.

These 5- and 10-man teams are great for us the players, but they aren't hiring.

Even the best freelancer that gets hired everywhere will get fucked because he/she don't have insurance and stability.
 
Big Studios could also make many smaller riskier games, instead of one big mass market game. Then when you have a hit game, you make a more fleshed out sequel.
 
If you say so. I just tried to suggest video games used to be small passion projects mainly developed solo or by a small pack of bedroom programmers back in its hayday implying we may be coming back full circle to that.
Yep

It actually reminds me of this~



But the gaming equivalent..
 
Used to feel good about video games going main stream. It's the worst thing that could have happened to our hobby imo.

Game prices increasing across the board, whilst quality is mostly going down. Physical discs containing 85mb of data and the game has to be downloaded from servers for single player games. Over blown budgets mostly due to marketing.

Smaller teams are starting to birth better games than huge AAA studios. If a reset or change/s is going to happen to the gaming industry, at this stage I cannot wait for it to start.
Literally anything that goes main stream gets destroyed.
The best example is the Internet itself and Consoles / Games.
As soon it hits the mainstream market they are only out the profit/revenue and dont care about anything else.

Most bigger devs forget that Gaming is about having a good/fun time (except for the LoL players I heard).
 
I think the smart publishers will be looking to release their AAA titles exactly as they are now, but rearrange some existing teams to create 2 or 3 studios who are given some leeway in what to produce. They can give us smaller titles at less cost that push new ideas and don't have to be targeted at a huge audience.
 
Interestingly, OP appears to take the narrative into a different dumber direction than the intentions of the author. Do we really need to dumb this topic down to be able to discuss it?

What can we do to improve mismanagement of some bigger studios like Ubisoft. I mean, Rockstar seems to be able to do it well..
A start is to get rid of Yves, he is an absolute cancer in running that place.
 
Basically AAA publishers are pissed that smaller games are seeing massive successes on Steam (eg Schedule I, R.E.P.O, and Balatro), as people shift towards buying games that are fun, over manufactured massive "good" games (AAA cinematic games promoted with GOTY shits from sites like IGN, Polygon)
 
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de-corporatizing is what will save this industry and hobby. go watch old behind-the-scenes videos of the dev teams from gen6 and earlier. they're "unprofessional" as fuck. watch the Gears of War 2 making of, they call Rod Fergusson (producer) "a walking HR nightmare".

We made good games and turned them around fast when it was just nerds in an office goofing around, making shit they thought was cool and cranking out the work without having to run every decision by a panel of suits or 'consultants'
 
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Too many games for the subset of the player base who are willing to buy them. It's a game of musical chairs. As the industry contracts, some of those involved are turning on the others to justify why they should get to stay in the industry and the others shouldn't.

Arguing with the free market is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
 
I cannot speak for the industry, but I know I have moved on (mostly) from the big AAA games and have been playing more of the indie stuff and hitting my backlog. I don't have much on my PS5 and Switch that I haven't played, but between Game Pass and my Steam backlog, I've got plenty of games to play. I don't think that this is my last generation, but I am starting to be very selective on the games that I buy with the price increases.
 
I suppose there is a difference in having your idea for a feature take 3 weeks just to go up the ladder of bloat, than to turn to dave sitting across the way and shout you idea across the room.
 
I didn't read all that, but "deprofessionalization" is not only an awkward term but a misnomer. People who create successful indie or AA games are not doing it casually in their free time. They are investing a lot of time and often money into it, putting in years of effort, in some cases risking their financial solvency. I think they qualify as "professionals."
 
If anything, professionalism (a real word) is lean and passionate indie teams that can find an audience and success exponential to the initial financial budget.

And they are creative as fuck too.

And many of them communicate to their consumers and take feedback in future patches.

Yah, know how shit used to be before the bloat, ponderous budgets, and the long ass dev cycle of the AAAs of the last 10 to 15 years. Wasn't that long ago that big studios valued close knit teams and being all about using that expertise and innovation towards making excellent games with less

This author sees the writing on the wall that many people may not drop 80 bucks on AAAs when Indies and AA are often priced way less and many are well crafted. Instead of discussing what went wrong in AAA with regards to budget, bloat, and price, a bullshit new word was invoked and he throws shade on indies as 'devaluing labor'. So no soul searching.... just cope. Fuck off with this shit.
 
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I welcome the deprofessionalization of the current state of gaming industry.

Its gotten too out of hand trying to dumb down games to the point we have Hellblade II, a fucking walking simulator.
 
I didn't read all that, but "deprofessionalization" is not only an awkward term but a misnomer. People who create successful indie or AA games are not doing it casually in their free time. They are investing a lot of time and often money into it, putting in years of effort, in some cases risking their financial solvency. I think they qualify as "professionals."
AFAIK the author talked about "deprofessionalization" of the industry as a whole in the linear context of potentially less career opportunities and less professionals working in it.
 
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What a joke.

Always there have been from time to time some small one time wonder game released by some randome new and tiny indie team that work pretty well. But are ultra rare exceptions in the insanely huge giant graveyard that are the indie games.

These very rare cases of very, very successful indie games aren't even a 0.001% of the money made in the industry, they aren't representative at all.
 
This "professionalization" is what made videogames such woke vomit in the past 10 years. When your company decides you need "narrative designers", think about the people they were hiring to do that job and what it led to.
 
This "professionalization" is what made videogames such woke vomit in the past 10 years. When your company decides you need "narrative designers", think about the people they were hiring to do that job and what it led to.
Big studios materialized when investors and executives discovered that they could potentially make billion dollar profits by going up and above others' means. In turn it gave the industry a lot of new employees and expertise/professionals, some of who started their own indie studios. It had literally nothing to do with "woke".
 
Musicians are looking at what indie devs are doing in the gaming space with a massive amount of envy, because any gripes that people have with the gaming industry, the music industry is 10x worse.

Indie game devs need to hope and pray that services like gamepass don't catch on too much. The idea of a Spotify-like service for gaming, becoming the norm, would ruin everything for them, as they would earn mere pennies per play. And they don't have concerts or sponsors to fall back on when it comes to revenue.
 
Big studios materialized when investors and executives discovered that they could potentially make billion dollar profits by going up and above others' means. In turn it gave the industry a lot of new employees and expertise/professionals, some of who started their own indie studios. It had literally nothing to do with "woke".
The establishment of big studios led to lots of people being hired including from places that didn't typically generate videogame developers, like English departments at universities (that graduate probably what, 98% left wing people?). This establishment of a bureaucracy and increased professionalization is what led to wokeness in games. It wasn't also this industry where this happened.
 
Big studios materialized when investors and executives discovered that they could potentially make billion dollar profits by going up and above others' means. In turn it gave the industry a lot of new employees and expertise/professionals, some of who started their own indie studios. It had literally nothing to do with "woke".
Big studio is a way to increase chances and profits. So it's understandable that industry drifted there quite a lot. The smaller games are the higher number of deaths and even death ratio of games
People like to talk about indie-/AA gaming, based on some games that made famous and successful.
Nobody talks about vast amount of games those left forgotten with little or no success. Simply run Steam queue to see a lot even AA games that no one knows and those will be forgotten the moment you click "Next"

The studio is independent.
It's not a definition of indie game
 
6 years in dev means its not a threat to anyone.

Sorry kids.

What gets me is the offhanded way people just shrug off timescales like that... Like have any of you ever spent 6 years of your working lives on something before you saw a penny in return?

It cracks me up when people act like spending $80 on a game that disappoints them is a fucking catastrophe, but don't even flinch at the reality of having to sink years into payroll and production costs in the hope that one day it'll make its money back. If that was your money, your time, how casual would you be about it?
 
The article is not from the perspective of the consumer. The consumer likes fun games. And if that is found in smaller games then so be it.

The perspective is that of a site that supports game developers and thus sees any move to smaller teams as a threat as to sheer employment of developers which in turn threatens said site's finances.

Whereas ... the consumer isn't in the business of supporting too many people making too many unfun games.
 
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The establishment of big studios led to lots of people being hired including from places that didn't typically generate videogame developers, like English departments at universities (that graduate probably what, 98% left wing people?). This establishment of a bureaucracy and increased professionalization is what led to wokeness in games. It wasn't also this industry where this happened.
With an increase in people in an industry you'll linearly bring people with all kinds of different attributes and opinions. I'm sure there also are a few MAGAs sprinkled in there to make some other people's confirmation bias go off as well.
 
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With an increase in people in an industry you'll linearly bring people with all kinds of different attributes and opinions. I'm sure there also are a few MAGAs sprinkled in there to make some other peoples confirmation bias senses go off as well.
that's not really how this works, and you see it across all corporations and institutions. You also see it in the game output of the past 10 years although I am sure next you will tell me that it's not the case. So keep believing whatever nonsense you choose to believe.
 
that's not really how this works, and you see it across all corporations and institutions. You also see it in the game output of the past 10 years although I am sure next you will tell me that it's not the case. So keep believing whatever nonsense you choose to believe.
Yeah yeah, you guys told us that both KCD2 and Shadows was broken by this imaginary wokeness as well. Talk about nonsense..
 
Yeah yeah, you guys told us that both KCD2 and Shadows was broken by this imaginary wokeness as well. Talk about nonsense..
I mean, the content of those games was the content of those games. Whatever sales they did is a different thing entirely. So yea nice try moving the goalposts.
 
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