Rip and Tear: Job Hunting in Gaming’s Hunger Games Era

I have a high degree of impostor syndrome going into this. 😅

I feel that these kinds of articles are usually written by big names in the gaming industry who have the power to shake things up and draw attention to glaring issues. However, I’ll bite the bullet! 

Today, you won’t read the story of a gaming industry veteran, ex-Blizzard, ex-Riot, etc., but rather one of a  “more average Joe”. Or Paul. But a Paul who is passionate about gaming and the industry of creating games.

My higher education is in management and marketing, but my chosen path is that of a Product Manager for digital apps. Including free-to-play mobile games.

I worked for around 15 years as a PM so far, 5 of which are in the gaming industry. 

I came to the gaming industry from classifieds/e-commerce and was very proud that I was able to pass all the interviews to become a PM at Gameloft Bucharest back in 2019.

Since then, I burned through the phases, learned the jargon, planned and executed the LiveOps, built the features, and even became, for a short period of time, the Monetization Director of the studio.

I think it was misfortune that broke my streak. Or a balance sheet review done by the CFO. 

I was in a pretty good state at the beginning of 2023. Monetization Director of the Gameloft Studio in Bucharest, organizing an internal PM school, actively recruiting and managing a portfolio of midcore games.

But faster than I could say “layoff”, I realized how fragile this whole career was. The Bucharest studio was restructured, focusing more on premium mobile games rather than free-to-play. The games we initially managed were moved to Vietnam, where the workforce is cheaper, or sold to other studios altogether.

So there was no need for a monetization team anymore. One by one, my colleagues left or were laid off, and I remained as a sort of “meta game designer”, studying Unreal Engine and various types of shooter mechanics, while working on prototypes that never saw the light of day. 

The entire studio plunged into uncertainty. No new projects were in sight, our pitches to various companies were good, but not good enough. So we were stagnating. Waiting for another potentially destructive decision from up top.

In all honesty, it felt wrong. I felt wrong. Maybe I was a victim of the sunken cost fallacy, but still, I wanted to work on a free-to-play game. And since there was no good opportunity inside the company, I started to look for a job outside Gameloft. 

What came next was a period of unrest, turmoil, and a lot of interviews.

I applied to many PM (or equivalent) gaming jobs online. On LinkedIn or other gaming job websites. Big and small companies. Locally and internationally.

Looking back at this time, probably the one thing that I would say I am grateful for is getting the chance to speak with people from a lot of the companies I only read about in the news. I’m talking Supercell, Voodoo, Homa, Crytek, Fortis, and many more. That was the “fun” part. But I guess this is where the positives end.

A few observations of my own:

After going through tens of interviews that spanned across a year and a half, I boiled it down.

• ↔️ All interviews are the same. Whether you talk to a “unicorn company”, a startup, or the funkiest, most out-of-the-box gaming company, they still put you through the same processes. Even if they, for some reason, pitch themselves as different from the rest. 

An interview with the recruiter, one with the hiring manager, a case study, a presentation of that case study, a cultural fit, and perhaps a final offer interview. Like clockwork, each time. 

Some companies stood out, though. One, for example, wanted me to spend 6h in back-to-back interviews (which I refused because I have dignity 😏). And another offered to invite me to their headquarters for the final interviews (if I ever got there 😅). Not sure if the trip was covered by them or me, though.

• 🪓 The gauntlet of back-to-back interviews. Since I mentioned it in the first post, what’s up with that? What would you prove by going from interview to interview? That you’re dedicated and resilient? Don’t you have much to do in your current job? Maybe you’re desperate? To me, this whole gauntlet felt like a crass disregard of my personal time. I can prove I’m a worthy PM and professional without jumping through hoops or being exhausted from repeating the same things for each manager who stays in line for the next interview.

• 👻 Ghosting. This was, and I believe still is, a common practice among recruiters. Today they are your best friends, tomorrow they don’t reply anymore. I think I had this happen to me more times than I can count. Especially when asking for feedback on the case study. It was like a given: if the recruiter wouldn’t reply in a day or two, most probably they won’t reply at all. And for sure, you wouldn’t get the job. “You spent a few days, maybe a week, doing the case study? Tough luck, we have too many candidates to really give feedback to everybody.”

• ⚔️ Candidates level over 9000. Because I was applying internationally for remote jobs, the competition level was definitely higher than the local market. The problem with the local market was that there weren’t too many gaming companies in Romania to begin with. The problem with the international one is that at any point in time, there are at least 10 other candidates better or cheaper than you, ready to take the job.

• 🧠 Overcomplicated case studies. I get complicated case studies. I do. Especially given the high level of competition for some of these roles. But sometimes, some companies ask you to really go above and beyond in order to even have a fighting chance. I’ve seen case studies that require you to solve issues that not even the companies themselves have managed to solve, or to do complex calculations in the dark, without any context of what is going on internally. As one random commenter on LinkedIn said once: these companies ask us to do their problem solving and don’t even pay us money for it 😂.

• 💰Money. Companies look for the best bang for their bucks. And who can blame them? As long as there’s demand, they can charge as little as possible for the same amount of work. Or more. My salary ask wasn’t extreme. I’ve been a hiring manager myself at Gameloft, searching for international candidates. And I can tell you for sure that my Senior PM’s ask was much lower than a Mid-Data analyst from Western countries. Even so, I would get a lot of debate over the salary. One thing which I found annoying was a trend of companies offering me a lower base salary and a promise of future bonuses in the form of company stock or performance (that may never come to be). This feels disingenuous. Like a patch applied to half the wound, and the request to think of happy thoughts until the rest heals on its own.

• 💩 The bullshit. Even though I am aware of my faults and realize I make mistakes, I still think I got a lot of bullshit reasons for rejection across the many months I applied for various PM jobs. From “not being specific enough” to (and I kid you not) “being too specific”. Sometimes I even got feedback on things missing from my case study that I knew for a fact I included. What gives? At the end of the day, I guess we’re all humans, and the evaluations are as flawed as they can be. Strong impressions and politics still turn the tide for some candidates. Or their lower cost, which makes them a “better opportunity”.

• 🔥Burnout and self-doubt. I never thought that going through interviews would actually affect me. But the repetition and the inability to actually find something that sticks clearly took a toll on my overall mental health. You get tired of repeating the same story over and over again, of presenting the same examples, in hopes that this time they will convince the people that need convincing. On the other hand, self-doubt rears its ugly head each time you “nearly got it”. It suffices to be the second best. And then you start asking yourself if you’re really good enough for this type of role. For this type of industry. Or if it’s better to search for something else. Something that you’re better at. 

• 🌀 Ever-changing roles. A weird situation encountered is interacting with companies that don’t know who they are looking for. I was in multiple interviews where the JD, title, and seniority changed while I was in the interview process. Needless to say, I was rejected because all of a sudden, I didn’t meet the new expectations. What? 🤷‍♂️ 

• 🤔 What does a PM do? Speaking about changing roles, the responsibilities of the PM were also a subject of debate in my interviews. Some companies expected a game PM to be a technical owner, others expected him to do marketing as well, and others to design. I still see posts like: “product manager wanted with game designer mindset” on LinkedIn. While I get that a PM usually is a more interdisciplinary role, doing data analysis, sometimes a bit of design, marketing, and economy work, I don’t really appreciate companies that try to squish 2 or more roles in one, with no changes in the salary given.    

• 🤪 The super productive ones. While we’re still in the realm of weird, I remember having one interview with a super abrupt hiring manager that at some point in the discussion asked me: ok, all good and well, but how many games can you manage per week? And that wasn’t even a trick question. Their business was one of volume. I didn’t realize this from the JD, though. I guess it’s just like in the factory, then: the more products you check, the better the pay?

• 🙈Hire, layoff, hire again scheme. I even experienced multiple situations where I got pretty far into the interviewing process with some companies that stopped recruiting because they suddenly went through a restructuring. And then, after two weeks, they came back to ask if I was still interested. The reason I said no was that the hiring manager wasn’t honest about what happened and tried to brush off a very serious thing. I found out about the restructuring from media articles and Linkedin posts; the people I was in touch with acted like it was another Tuesday.

• 🙏 Where is the honesty? While there might be some more anecdotal wisdom to share from my experience, the final point I wanted to make is in the form of a question: Where is the honesty? And I’m not talking about candidates being honest. That’s easy to spot. I’m talking about companies inflating their projects, their results, and their demands. Because realistically, there’s no easy way to check all this for a candidate. Sure, you can create an account on Glassdoor, and you can get in touch on Linkedin with other company employees. Or you can take a look at Sensortower. But the truth is that all of this is approximate data that can be completely false sometimes. A candidate is mostly guided by a promise from some people that he has to believe. And more than we’d like to admit, the grass is greener during the interviewing process than the actual work that follows.

So at the end of all this, what’s the grand lesson I learned? What’s that very precious insight that this time spent interviewing has provided?

My advice, while being super cliche, is to continue believing in yourself and stay laser-focused on what you want. If you genuinely think you have the experience and the grit, keep searching, keep applying. Be humble, but smart. Don’t accept bad treatment. If you need money, don’t be afraid to apply outside the gaming industry until you find something suited inside it. At the end of the day, it’s your journey. Shape it the best you can!

Good luck out there!