The industry does not owe you a job

This is a bitter truth, unfortunately. However eager or however passionate you are, never, ever walk into this industry telling yourself you will find a job. No company owes you a job. Back when hypercasual blew up and Turkey appeared on the game industry’s radar, talent was very hard to find and the volume of work was far bigger, so companies hired anyone they saw even a flicker of light in and taught them on the job. I did it myself back then, and even in 2022 a single listing would get 200+ applications. These days there are no more than 5000 people in the game industry here who can work for a salary, and the number of active companies paying salaries is somewhere between 100 and 150. You work out for yourself how many applications an open listing gets. In the past there were nearly 1000 companies, big and small, and the volume was much bigger. Even companies with 20 to 30 people were called small.

However much the old-headed dinosaurs on their high horses deny it, the contribution of the HC era was enormous, and in fact most of the successful Steam games coming out these days come from former HC people. Yusuf pushed the door open with Supermarket Sim, successful games came from several different teams in between, and Ore Factory arrived most recently. And you cannot skip Rollic, the company behind this whole game industry boom, Utku and Burak in particular laid the building blocks for widening the country’s talent pool this much. On the mobile side Dream took the flag from Peak, and ex-Dream and ex-Rollic people still raise money from each other at valuations reaching a billion.

But there is a nuance in hiring. Back then there was less know-how and very little talent, so a company that raised money immediately went and pushed its headcount up. Now, even though the industry is carved up into little fiefdoms, know-how has spread and there are genuinely capable developers around. Add AI on top of that and companies can get the same output at even 1/10 of their old volume. Profit margins have also almost halved compared to before. So companies have almost completely stopped hiring at the Jr to mid level.

The most expensive people in a company are always the ones between intern and mid. Because you have to spend time on them, and the scarcest commodity in the game industry is time. You have to train the developer until they learn the work, how it runs, the vision and the dynamics of the industry. That takes both time and money. Yes, on paper they take home less at the end of the month, but once you do the accounting on time, they usually come out more expensive than seniors. So not hiring you is not bad faith, it is arithmetic.

And when you add on top of all that the employees who never take ownership of the project, decide they have finished developing themselves, jump ship in the middle of the road and constantly chase more money, companies stopped training anyone.

You could ask whether companies are stupid, whether they never think ahead, where they will find talent later. Look at the credits of two games from the same company and you will see the names have largely changed. The game industry runs project by project, and the moment the project changes almost the entire team rotates out except the core team that gives the company its vision, and sometimes people leave from the core team too. On mobile it does not become a problem because companies exit within 5 years anyway, but turnover is very high there as well. Even if they hire you, when that project ends you will probably not be at the same desk.

On the PC and console side, to be blunt, we still have 40 ovens of bread to eat before AA, as the saying goes, and by the time we get the know-how that carries those budgets, AA games are going extinct. If you look at the games in this country that claim to define themselves with any number of A’s, you can see at first glance where they stand and what they are missing. Until we reach AA scale, this country can produce 100 hit indies and the number of listings companies open in 2 years still will not pass 200, because in indie the aim is not to grow, it is to widen where you already stand. What that means is hiring just enough not to hold up the work, keeping the balance on your current games, and putting up enough budget to move to a new game. So the number of listings does not rise as the indie scene grows, those are not the same thing.

This industry feeds itself anyway, and whatever happens, new people will keep making games as long as the passion is there. Especially while the barrier to entry into the game industry drops every day. Even if companies never train new talent, it will sprout on its own and individual indies will keep coming out. Digital Game Design departments, DOT, have opened everywhere in the country, random academics with no connection to games teach the classes everywhere, but the ratio of graduates to listings is at least 10 to 1, and hiring leans more towards software and business people from Koç, Sabancı, Bilkent and maybe Boğaziçi, while for art it is usually fine arts schools like Mimar Sinan that lead. Even if you study DOT you are not ahead of the people graduating from those. And the DOT departments keep pumping candidates into the industry.

Everything I have written so far was the company side, now let me write the other side, because for someone entering the industry these are not separate roads. If nobody is hiring you, it means you are going to sell your own game. If you absolutely want into this industry, the best thing you can do is create your own opportunities. The only way to do that is to keep producing without stopping, and the price of that is squandering your 20s on learning. Because however much indies look like they succeeded in a single day, that success usually arrives in 7 years + 1 day.

One of the biggest problems of the game industry is that you only learn by failing. That takes enormous mental discipline. When you have made 10 games and failed, you need the strength to make the 11th. When you succeed early you learn almost nothing, and on top of that you usually go blind. You can start pouring ridiculous money into ridiculous projects on the logic that you succeeded once so you will succeed again. But when you arrive after failing over and over, you largely get ahead of that, and the probability of your next project succeeding is much higher than it is for someone who came from early success.

Putting out something playable on your own may look easy, but putting out something sellable takes at least 5 years of experience, because only by then do you work out what does not sell and stop wasting your time. However advanced AI gets, being able to finish a game is still a huge achievement, and most projects still come as far as 80% and die. Because the last 20% still takes 80% of the time, and when you go out into the field and meet players you spend another 100% of it, and the players become your greatest teacher.

Creating your own opportunity has a money side too. The moment you sell your own game, what you face is not a salary, it is gross.

Even if you only want to earn minimum wage on your own, the math is this. If we set friendslop aside, an average indie game right now takes 1 year to make and has a tag price of $7. That changes with discounts, with regional pricing and with which region it sells in, but it usually sells 30% below that price. Call it $5 to keep the math easy. Minimum wage in Turkey right now is $590. You have around $200 of Bağ-Kur, the self-employed social security payment, and $150 to $200 of accounting and withholding filing costs. The net monthly money you have to make is at least $1000. That is after Steam’s cut, refunds and withholding tax, so it is 52 to 56% of the number you see in gross. To make $1000 in 1 month, you need to be able to sell at least around 400 copies a month.

Our state does not currently take tax on foreign earnings, as long as your company is younger than 3 years. If it is older it takes 10% minimum corporate tax. So I am taking income tax straight out of the math, under normal conditions there would be 25% of that as well.

Say you did not open a company before the game came out. In that case, even calculating from the lowest end, you start $12,000 in the hole. Just to earn that money back and cover the most minimal production cost of the game, you have to do $25,000 in gross. That means 5000 copies. What reaches your hand is around $13,500, so the return on a year of your work only covers the money you spent living through that year. And if you want to earn at least minimum wage for 1 year, you have to sell those 5000 copies in the first week, and for that you need at least 25k Tier 1 focused wishlists. By the end of the year you also have to have sold at least 12 to 15k. On top of that the price per copy erodes almost every month, and every 6 months there is a 10 to 15% loss of value. That $5 becomes $4 per copy by the end of the year. That covers the minimum living costs of 1 person at most, and that is ignoring inflation. These figures are general averages of course. On Metal Thunder I launched with 3k WL and did 60k sales in 21 months, which is an exceptional case.

I keep shouting at you to chase trends because the money for sustainability is there. And you can shove this post in the mouth of the grifters who try to look down on you for making a trend game. Passion, unfortunately, does not fill your stomach.

Of the software driven ones, this industry is by far the hardest. Because it has no objective truths, if you fail on your own there is no job you can walk into, and even if you have a job and ship something successful there is no guarantee you will have that job tomorrow. On top of that, if you are on a successful game all the praise goes to the decision makers, and when it fails the bill is written in your name. On the other side, even if you make something yourself, succeeding is very hard, and succeeding and then making something sustainable is much harder.

Until you succeed, your mental debt and your financial debt both keep growing. It really is an unbelievably hard industry, but when you do succeed you feel that all of it was worth it. The industry does not owe you a job, and you do not owe the industry anything either. As long as you do not stop producing, you can carve out a place for yourself.