What Do We Actually Know About Game Industry Employment?
Getting a time series of game industry employment shouldn't be harder than getting a game industry job itself! We keep hearing that the industry is collapsing, and in what might be a surprise to many, panic may not reflect reality.
Chart note: The China series covers a listed-company panel with unresolved workforce geography. Its roughly 200,000 workers are not a verified national employment total. Country definitions, periods, and source links are in the research data.
The layoffs are real, and they've been brutal for the people affected. But the employment figures I've found so far do not support a general claim that the industry has fallen off a cliff. Unfortunately, it's patchy information; shocking, given the degree to which we've been awful at tracking our own significance.
Part of this may be a revolution of rising expectations. After years of expansion and rising wages (boy, no one likes to acknowledge that), anything below 2% real growth feels like collapse. But that's still a long way from the kind of contraction that put Atari cartridges in a landfill somewhere in Nevada.
The other shocking piece of the employment analysis was the revelation that our bark is bigger than our bite. Games are culturally enormous, but employment is a relatively small sector in many countries. The best data says maybe 200k employees in China - even if that's off by a factor of 5, Amazon alone employs more people, and we're talking about a country of 1B+.
All the data and sources with the needed nuance are on GitHub; please point out any sources I've missed or should add! I'm working on LinkedIn scraping next. If we want to talk seriously about the industry's health, we need a better account of how many people work in it.
Reproducible sources: Game industry employment research