Amir Satvat, the game job champion, estimated recently that about 230,000 people work in the game industry. That sounded low to Kenn White, one of the leaders of the Game Industry Coffee Chat. So White’s crew dug into the numbers on their own and came up with their own defensible estimate of 740,000 to 900,000.
White, a longtime game developer, said in a LinkedIn post that the median number of their estimates (ranging from low end to high end) is 833,000 game industry employees across more than 25,000 companies. That sounds a lot more impressive, but it’s such a wide variation compared to Satvat’s bottoms-up estimate. Satvat raised his estimate to about 350,000, based on his own analysis of White’s information, but the two sides still remain pretty far apart for people directly employed in games.
White said in his post that this estimate this includes developers and publishers working in PC, Console, Mobile, AR/VR, as well as external developers and outsourcers.
It includes functions like art, engineering, production, management, marketing, sales, and other SG&A and Admin functions. It is not meant to include (and we tried to ensure we did not include) headcount and companies whose primary competency is NOT developing or publishing games.“When we were working on this list (Kenn White, Brandon Hagerman, and others still), we got to collaborate with Amir Satvat in a very open, honest, top-down methodology, and kept asking ourselves: Why has no one done this work before to figure this out?” said Neil Haldar, a game industry veteran.
Haldar added, “This is meant to be an answer for a snapshot in time. We might go back and re-run the research at some point, but it’s not meant to be a forever-updating body of work that many others will work on ad infinitum.”
He said the group is open to feedback and will continue to work on the accuracy of the estimate and the assumptions. The group has estimates for each country in terms of low and high estimates of …