Amir: [00:00:00] I have loved games my whole life, but before any of this 20 22, 20 23, all the layoffs that were happening, I grew up in a small town in Connecticut, not unlike the boonies, but I did not know a single person in the games industry, not for lack of trying until I was 35 years old. And so, despite the fact that I always wanted to find a job in games, I didn't know what to do.

To make a long story short, I finally broke through at age 38. 

Alex: That was am mere, sat by day biz dev exec at Tencent, and by night the operator of the largest game job seeking community. On the net talking about perseverance. Like look at that. Yeah, that's how you do it. 17 years of job hunting. I sure hope that's not the case for folks who are looking right now, but credit to Amir knowing this was his dream.

Sticking with it [00:01:00] and landing it and then paying it forward. 

Aaron: Yeah, totally paying it forward. He helps how many, it was like in the thousands, right? 

Alex: He, I think he said they've been a part of landing 3,300 jobs in the industry. Yeah. That's crazy. Which what? Just great resource. Hey, if anybody doesn't know about this community, we'll put a link up in the show notes.

But if you're looking to get into game making or in the industry and looking for your next gig, you should be following Amir on, uh, on 

Aaron: like LinkedIn. LinkedIn, yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of ways to get in now too. And I think not to just like, too encourage, I would say that 17 is probably normal now with how easy you can apply and how big the, the landscape is.

Wait, wait, 

Alex: what do you mean 17 is normal? 

Aaron: Well, the rejection or 17 years, I would say the. I got, I got the information wrong in my head. I heard [00:02:00] 17, but it's, it's how long What, what, what's the, what's the he star? He started looking 

Alex: for a job in games of 21 

Aaron: and, yeah. Yeah. Okay. He got 

Alex: a job at 38. That's 17 years.

Yeah. That okay? Yeah. You were trying to say something d I'm thinking you were thinking you could get in when you're 17 years 

Aaron: old. Is that what you're thinking now? I think you can, 

Amir: yeah. I think now. I think so. 

Aaron: I think now it's a lot easier, but also what he was providing is a lot. There was an era that, what his skillset is, there wasn't enough people, 'cause he's, he's like an analyst.

Like analytics became, remember when we started doing industrial toys analytics for his like. Newer, new, right? Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah. Well, I mean there's, there's different kinds of analyst roles and there's so many roles in games, but you know, like, you know, product management of like analyzing data from a game and optimizing, that's one thing.

And then there's like business analysts of like, looking out at the industry and like, where are the trends coming? You know, who are the developers we should be talking to? I think that's more what Amir does in his day job. But yeah, [00:03:00] both of those are 

Aaron: careers. Yeah, because in my mind I like the, maybe you know more about that 'cause you're on the business side of things and I don't really see that.

Like how much money is CD costs, the, like all that stuff that matters. Like in the, like the, the money stuff. I'm thinking more of like the free to play. You don't say money stuff again. I think of the analytics. Well, no, seriously. 'cause I think like App Annie, like, that's like the first thing I go to in my mind.

It's like. Those numbers, like how many people install it, how long do they play it? Right, right. Yeah. Those numbers and like tweaking those numbers to get, that's like a product manager's job. Yeah, you're right. I didn't think, like, now that I hear you saying that, like when we were speaking to him, I was, that's the hat I had on in my head and I wasn't thinking about what you just said, which is, which is something that you never see from the product manager side, I guess.

Right? Like you don't see the business 

Alex: development stuff is like, that's a whole other bag of beans to use your expression. [00:04:00] Speaking of which, what's happening in your, in your world, Aaron, anything new? Any any, any interesting? Are you trying 

Aaron: to like lead me to saying I just had a baby two days? 

Alex: Yes, I am.

Congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations. Are you getting any sleep? Uh, 

Aaron: no, actually I have not. It was, it's, it's very weird not sleeping like it is the, I realize, oh my gosh. Sleep is the most important thing you can do in your life. 

Alex: Um, if it breaks, I, oh my gosh. Yeah. I'm just, I'm remembering what it was like to be sleep deprived and Oh, I feel for you, buddy.

Aaron: Yeah, it's weird. Like, I'm hallucinating. It's like, what? Why is there a scorpion on the table? Like, there's no scorpion on the table. I'm just kidding. I'm not, but yeah, it's the, the, the not sleeping. Like I remember when I used to go to college. Play video games and study and do all this and get three hours of sleep and then go to school the next day and be a hundred percent.[00:05:00] 

Yeah, like young 

Amir: it's, 

Aaron: yeah. But now it's like I gotta have at least eight uninterrupted or else it's like, yeah, nothing's getting done. 

Alex: Yeah. But yeah. Well, well you were, uh, well probably poor Apley, uh, your lovely wife was giving birth to your child. I was off on spring break, just chilling, doing nothing.

Hawaii sleeping. I had to take a nap during the day. Read a book. Yeah, no, it was fantastic. 

Aaron: Hawaii is like the best place to go on vacation, I think. I really think it's one of the best places to go. Like you can go anywhere on that island and it's just nice. The weather's nice. I 

Alex: will say I'm a big fan. I love the pace, the environment, just the vibe, the people, the food island, everything.

I was on the big island of Hawaii. It's the volcano one. Yeah, yeah. There's the volcano that's just going bonkers right now. But my vacation vibe is, I just like to literally take it easy, [00:06:00] you know? This is what vacation means to me. I don't set the alarm for waking up. I don't have anything on my calendar except for maybe tennis.

But you still check in at work. I saw 

Aaron: you 

Alex: chatting on chatroom. That's don't, don't tell, 

Aaron: that's not, 

Alex: don't tell Laura. 

Aaron: Yeah, but 

Alex: I, come on, man. I love this stuff. So it's like, you know, 

Aaron: yeah, I know what you mean. 

Alex: So I could do that anywhere though. So I technically I could vacation anywhere technically. Yeah.

See, I can't, 

Aaron: we're that, I've been to a few cities, and I'm not gonna say their name, where it's just like, what is that architecture of the United States where it's just like a brown building and, and, and it's like low and it's a box, you know? Uh. There's certain cities that look like, okay. It's like Carroll Stream looks like this.

Oh, okay. You know, almo 

Alex: almost like industrial kind of brutalist architecture. 

Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. Like I this city where you go there. Okay. And you can't 

Alex: vacation there and like there's 

Aaron: just the chilies. [00:07:00] 

Amir: Oh God. It's like, 

Aaron: I don't wanna go home. Yeah. 

Alex: Okay. All right. Well, I know y'all didn't line up and do a real long download to listen to us talk about Chili's.

So thrilled to get some time to chat with Amir who's doing something really unique in our industry. It's a great story. 

Aaron: Yeah, it's really inspiring. It is very, just his 

Alex: personal journey. It's kind of what he is doing in the community. So hope you enjoy this conversation. We'll see you on the side. 

Aaron: See you.

Alex: Welcome to the Fourth Curtain Friends, and today we have a very special episode with a very special guest. We're joined by none other than Amir sat. Hello by today. Amir is a biz dev executive at Tencent, the largest video game company in the world by revenue. I looked this up. Is there something like Tencent, something like a $22 billion company?

Amir: We're in the tens. We certainly, most certainly are. Alex. Yeah. Yes. Okay. It's 

Alex: a big, big company. His side hustle is his game community that he built to help people find a job in the [00:08:00] games industry. He and his community has gained a lot of notoriety over the last couple of years as the games industry has been hit with a lot of layoffs.

About 35,000 positions eliminated in the last three years alone. He was recently awarded the Game Changer Award at the annual game award celebration this past December. I saw on your website you have a mission, uh, and under the mission there's a quote, doing good for others is its own reward. I love that.

It's a great message. I wish more people had that point of view. Welcome here. Thank you. It's great to see you. It's great to see. How are you? 

Amir: Thanks. I am. I'm great. I'm great. You know, I just, uh, you know, we live in a complex world these days, but you hold on to things that you love and feel really positive about.

And you talked about one, Alex, which is trying to do kindness for others, but I also today look forward to celebrating another, which is I just. Love this industry and meeting, you know, other great games people and just having fun conversations. So this is, uh, a real [00:09:00] treat to be here today. Thank you. 

Alex: Oh, tha I I'm sorry you ended up on, on, on this show then.

No, just kidding. Yeah. Sorry. Mi you know, I get the sense that you're an optimist and a positive person. Have you always been that way? 

Amir: I have. You know, I think that my, my parents, I get a little bit of this from my family and a little bit of it from my wife. You know, my, I was born in the United States, but my parents came from Iran in the seventies.

My dad came here in 1970 to New York to train as a doctor with nothing but his briefcase. And you know, certainly my parents went through a lot to get to where we are having the comfortable life we have. And so I think they never complained about everything and tried to help others. But also for my wife who's a development economist and she's really is passionate about her work the same way I'm about games.

She'll go to a place like Nigeria and come back and be like, honey, I went to a place where people live on household income of a thousand dollars a year, and the [00:10:00] maternal mortality is 30 times what it is here in the us. And when you hear something like that, at least for me, you realize that for most people in this country, you really have nothing to complain about ever and should just be grateful and try to be kind to others.

So that's, I owe those two groups for that. 

Alex: Yeah, no, that's, that is quite some perspective. It's not really the way it is here though. People do like to complain, don't they? Yeah. Alex was just complaining before we started recording. I'm, I will admit, I'm a pretty good complainer, but 

Amir: everybody, everybody complains, but you know what it is?

I feel like there's complaining and there's like social complaining the same way people used to say like, social smoking. I feel like social complaining is fine. 

Alex: That's, 

Amir: that's what you do with your friends, 

Alex: right? Okay. It's a little peer pressure. Everybody's complaining a little bit too. Yeah. Um. All right.

Well, you know, I, I would love to chat about your game community. 

Aaron: That's like the biggest topic, right? 

Alex: Well, I think it's fantastic and it's definitely needed. How, how did that get started? [00:11:00] 

Amir: It's very interesting. I'll give you a little bit, a little bit a backdrop 'cause I think it's important to explain what it is and why it's important.

So, I have loved games my whole life, but before any of this 20 22, 20 23, all the layoffs that were happening, I, as we were talking about in pre-discussion, grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Not in like the Boonie, but I did not know a single person in the games industry. Not for lack of trying until I was 35 years old.

And so, despite the fact that I always wanted to find a job in games, I didn't know what to do and personal decision. I'm very close to my family and the diaspora Persian people that I live around here in the northeast. So I never wanted to leave the East coast. To make a long story short, I finally broke through at age 38.

But when I finally did, I feel like I finally found someone who had let me work remotely, which was Amazon, and that was great. And now Tencent. So I've been in the industry for five years, which has been just a such a [00:12:00] blessing. But you know, I find that people, when they go through a challenge like that in their life, often have kind of polar reactions.

Some people it's like, oh, they had to climb the ranks, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna be tough on other people the same way. It was tough on me, but other people, which was my reaction, I think, say to themselves, you know what? I had to go through that. I'm gonna do anything in my human power to make sure that someone who's in my shoes doesn't have to go through the same thing.

So before I started the community, there was always something in my mind to begin with that I wanted to try to do something that was gonna help other gamers in some way. Finding jobs, having support, anything. Then the cuts start in the late 2020. Twos going into 2023, and I decided to start our community.

Amir Sat Fats Games community is a grounds up, zero profit, zero income community effort that seeks to provide common [00:13:00] sense resources and support for gamers that I wish I had had in not only trying to find their career, whether in games or not as gamers, but also to make them feel a sense of support, to never feel like they're alone and to have the things that I think they would need to find their way.

Because I started with my career, started in investment banking. I have a pretty thorough background between that and graduate school and data analysis and these types of things. And so it started with one resource, which was I found a bottoms up way of crawling every company in the games industry.

Started with 50 companies and now have a 99% complete list of 3,300 ish developers and publishers. And because I crawl every single webpage individually, it's the cleanest imaginable data bottoms up of every role across 20 functions. So it started with that and people being like, well, it's the most comprehensive source of jobs.

But then I [00:14:00] added four categories of community coaching, mentoring, CV reviews, mock interviews, art portfolio reviews. We started with 10 people. We now have 2300 plus people who offer free coaching, and they've done almost 65,000 conversations for the community for free. 

Alex: Oh, wow. Wait, wait, wait, wait. So hold on.

Like, like the free coaching. This is like, Hey, could you look at my resume, gimme feedback, that kind of coaching, or like help me refine my interviewing skills. Like what? What are we talking? 

Amir: We started with just mentoring, general mentoring. You can call me for any type of mentorship about any topic. Then it expanded into five different types of coaching.

So now we have mentoring. We have review for CVS and for LinkedIn profiles. We have mock and review coaching. We have specific art portfolio coaching, and I also now have one of the top 10 discord communities as part of our larger constellation, which itself has 10,000 plus members, and we now actually have dedicated reviewers, tens of [00:15:00] reviewers just on the discord itself to provide.

Help there too. That's cool. 

Alex: That's super cool. How are you finding these coaches? Like are they just volunteers, folks that have either come through your community that are like, you know what, I'll, I'm, I'm happy to help. 

Amir: It's all just volunteers, everything in the community. I think we have a few secret weapons.

One is that when I need to, I can flex the data muscle to do some of the more horsepower things that we need. But I also think the fact that we genuinely do it for no money and that I also work in the industry, it has meant building this network, this connective tissue of trust between the hiring managers, the recruiters, the people in the community.

That's why we have across all our platforms, blue Sky, uh, LinkedIn, and Discord, we have 500,000 unique. Monthly users, and in an average year, we have 4 million unique people who come across our community, as best as I can guess. I [00:16:00] now have a cashman that about 70 to 80% of the game industry comes across our community in some way has come across our community in some way.

And one out of every five jobs found by a gamer passes through our community at some point. Huh, 

Alex: wow, that's that's amazing. So 4 million visitors has way more than. Like people looking for a job, right? Because I think the game industry employs something like 200,000 people in the us. Is that right? I dunno 

Amir: if that's right.

My best. So my best, that's actually a good question. How many people work in games is actually a very complicated question. I've been trying to answer it for almost three years. I've concluded. So there's direct game jobs and indirect games shops. My best guess guys is the 230,000 people worldwide work in direct developing and publishing.

But you're absolutely right, Alex, that what that indeed means is, in fact, despite the fact that we are very well known as a games community, I've tried to expand that definition that you're a gamer [00:17:00] even if you don't work in the industry, if you love games. And so I would say only about 20% of typical volume in like a week is actually people who indicate as computer games on LinkedIn as their industry.

Alex: Huh. Okay. Wow. Very interesting. So let's, let's back up a little bit because you said something at the top that I think is super interesting, which is you never met anybody who was working in games till you were 35. You didn't get a job in games until you were 38. Is that right? Did I get that right?

That's right, that's right. Uh, and but had you always wanted to work in games? Like were you looking and you didn't get that job Yeah. Until 38? Or were you like, it didn't occur to you that until you met somebody who was in the industry that Oh, maybe I could actually do that. 

Amir: Oh no, I started applying at 21.

I had interview offers all kinds of places, you know, blizzard, ea, et cetera, many, many places. But the problem is they wanted me to move. They would say, move to Irv and move to Seattle. Okay. And so I could not get someone to gimme a job on the east coast of the United States. And there were only a few places.

[00:18:00] And you know, the few that I tried that were actually in the East coast, like Bethesda and so forth, I just, you know, just 'cause of luck. Couldn't get, couldn't find opportunities. What, 

Alex: what do you got against the West Coast? 

Amir: You 

Alex: know, you 

Amir: wanna, you don't wanna leave, 

Alex: uh, know what, you know what it is? Alex?

Amir: The best? The best Coast? Yeah. Connecticut's 

Alex: just the same. Connecticut's the same as California, right? Isn't it? Ish? I don't know. Maybe not. That's not fair. So it was Amazon 

Aaron: games the first one, or was it Amazon? 

Amir: It, it, it was, so I started working at Amazon and AWS and then I broke through at Amazon games as the BD and strategy lead.

I had a team of BDS for their prime gaming program. And then actually I was the producer for Amazon games, Montreal. And then when Amazon cut remote work, that's why I had to make a change. And so that's why I ended up going over to Tencent and now and bd. But it's actually super interesting. I grew up that community I told you about, of hundreds of Persian people.

And I'm an only child as well, very close to my family. They were so tight knit that I actually, I learned [00:19:00] fari first just slightly before I learned English. And they didn't have a school, so they made their own Persian school. And so it's very hard for me to express just how important being here in New England and being part of that community and being part of my family is, and so it's the only thing I love more than games.

So couldn't shake, she couldn't shake me off of that. Yeah. 

Alex: So, so, okay. So what was it like. Getting into the games industry after. So you were in, did you say you were in investment banking for a while? Is that what you were doing? 

Amir: Yes. So I started out in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. Then I was in graduate school for quite some time because at the time I assumed that this time you always keep hope, right?

Hope never dies. But pragmatically, I was like, there's no way anyone's giving me a job. There's no such thing as remote work. And so at the time, as I mentioned, my dad's a doctor. Many people in my family are in healthcare. I think many people in life have diverse interests. They have many things they could see themselves doing.

And so you don't get option [00:20:00] one, you go to option two. And so option two was, I had been working in healthcare banking at Goldman. So I was like, okay, my career is gonna be in healthcare. And so. I went to graduate school, I got a master's in health policy, and then I did my MBA and a master's in biotech, which is like molecular biology.

Wow. And biochemistry. And so I did a triple master's, then I was in healthcare like Corp Devon strategy. Then I was in tech, healthcare and strategy at like, you know, Dell, EMC, VMware, these types of places. And so it, it is more explainable when I kind of paint the big picture. Basically finance, health tech.

Check and then finally games. But in terms of what I've functionally done, I basically have done the same thing for 20 years, which is I've basically been in some spectrum of BD finance and strategy. And so that's how I finally broke through at Amazon, which is basically convincing them, I've got everything you want on the jd.

It's just not in the games vertical. So now [00:21:00] let me convince you how nutty I am about games. Just gimme a shot. 

Alex: Okay. Hey, I'm sure there are a lot of folks who are working in a role that's outside of games and want to get into games. Like what worked there? Like what's, you must have advice. 

Amir: I definitely do.

So like, I think the most important thing is, and I, I really as, as God is my witness. I mean this from about the time that I knew like what a job was, which is about, I don't know, middle school, late middle school. I got up almost every day, every week, whatever you like. And I told myself like, what are you doing?

To this week, this today, to get a job in games eventually. And so I started keeping a spreadsheet in about sixth, seventh grade of every game that I played heavily annotated by what I thought about, a detailed stuff in that. And so I played over 2300 games in my life. Whoa. Wow. 

Alex: Wait, wait, wait, wait. 

Amir: Really?

Alex: And you've got a spreadsheet I do. With all of these 

Amir: games in it. 

Alex: [00:22:00] I do. I do. Is this on, is this on your community website? 'cause this sounds like an amazing artifact. 

Amir: It is not, I have a list of everything I played, but I keep it private to myself. But okay. I draw upon that spreadsheet for all the articles and resources and other things I write about.

Of course, it's front ended because as, as you know, there were so many games in the NES era, SNES era, paca era, and so forth. Anyway, to make a long story short, my advice is, one, you should play as many games as possible to be very, very well-informed, and to think about it all the time, don't just fixate on one game.

Don't just play caught all day. All caughts, a perfectly fine game. Play lots of games. Advice number two is I read Voraciously everything that I could next gen, PC, gamer, you know, reading all the online blogs like I constantly thought about and read about games. And finally, the third thing is, even though I couldn't get a games job, and now I'm talking more like college, out of [00:23:00] college phase, I tried to always focus on.

What skill I could develop to eventually have in games, even though I wasn't necessarily in that area yet. And so since I knew I couldn't be in games, I figured my area would be, again, finance strategy, business development. And so always ask yourself, what are you gonna put on the table that makes it as easy as possible for that hiring manager to eat?

The one thing you don't have, which is you don't have it in the games vertical. And so those are kind of the three things I tried to do. And of course, as you get further on, this didn't start until 35. I tried to get much better about networking and just meeting other people in the industry, but that game quite late relative to the other things.

Aaron: Did you play 

Amir: Halo? Okay. I did put yes. Well if you played hundred games, I know I played, I played Halo and I played Halo and Bungee. Yes. Destiny and Destiny, I beg you're pardon of it. Yeah. 

Alex: I'm guessing you played like a couple of Halo games. Probably if you got [00:24:00] 2300 on there. I mean, I You must be a big fan of Dave the Diver 'cause he is all over your website.

Amir: I am. I am. I, it's 

Aaron: like Aaron, it's like your favorite game, right? It's a good game. I haven't got that far into it, but it's like you said, I play a lot of games too just to check him out. And Dave the Diver is a a legit cool game. Worth checking. 

Amir: It's a wonderful game and I like it even better when you meet like the dev team and they're like really lovely.

As good as the game is, it takes it to another level. And I met Jay Ho at. Dice, not this last year, but the year before. And he was so nice and we just really hit it off. He actually brought me, which I have in one of the four rooms behind me of games, collectibles. He brought me a sushi box that you can't get retail from the team that had all kinds of collectibles in it from the game.

And I was just, I was so, I was so deeply touched by that. 

Alex: Yeah. Oh, that's, do you have four rooms behind you filled with game collectibles? 

Amir: I do. I've been collecting those as well since I was probably, I don't know, six, six or seven. Yeah. You're like, what's your prize position, 

Alex: video [00:25:00] game, fan of all time. 

Amir: I really love games and it's a reminder to anyone listening to this podcast, you all really should give people more of a chance with remote work.

Unless you wanna lock people like me out until like, until like they're 38 years old, you know? 

Alex: Well, I think there's a lot more of that happening now. I mean, we, our studio's remote. 

Aaron: Yeah. We're fully remote. I was gonna say that you have four rooms. Do you have to have one? Like are they themed? Do you have one thing that's like, this is the, he wants to know if you have a 

Alex: war hammer room.

Do you have a whole room just for war hammer? 

Aaron: But do you have like a cool, like any old stuff they have a helmet, like hey, uh, like Alex says, I remember when Alex got that helmet. Actually, 

Amir: I have, I have some cool things. I have. Let me, there are two or three things that are pretty cool. I have a complete set of every single amiibo ever made, including like the really hard defined Japanese variants.

I have a complete set of every figure alternates and promos of the old wow miniatures game, if you remember that one. Yeah. Yeah. [00:26:00] And I have a lot of statues. I'm actually very good friends with the first four team, if you know, first four figures and I, they have very nice statues. So I have a lot of rare of, some of my particularly, I love of like Zelda, of like, actually my favorite game of all time is, uh, the Legend of Zelda Win Waker hd.

So my favorite collectible of all is, uh, king of red lions from first floor figures, which lights up. 

Alex: That's cool. Wow. 

Amir: Nice. 

Alex: That's awesome. Amazing. Um, at some point you'll have to give us a tour of your collectible rooms. That sounds pretty cool. Yeah. All right. So one thing I did want to get your perspective on, 'cause I get asked this a lot and we kind of debate this a bunch.

Why are we in the situation that we're in as an industry? Meaning the last few years has been a contraction, at least from the workforce instead of expansion. 

Amir: Sure. So Amir's opinion, not 10 cents opinion, but Amir's opinion on this is, I think there's a few factors, and I'll pick the three or four most important [00:27:00] ones.

I think factor one is, I think the match that lit it off certainly was. Incredibly built up demand because of Covid and over hiring that happened as a result of that, which certainly was not sustainable, but that's just kind of like the crack of the whip. I feel like the more fundamental problems that we have are, cause number two, I feel like game development has simply become way too expensive.

I think in terms of how we make games, the cost of making games, if we even, for example, compare AAA title in the West at like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to making Mario Odyssey in Japan for like 80 to a hundred million dollars we're even very high compared to that system, let alone the fact that if you take the cost of a developer in say, the West Coast, that developer in Eastern Europe or in Asia might be, you know, a third or a fifth of a cost or something like that.

So costs creep. I think the [00:28:00] third thing is there's just too much supply. If you look at the tens of thousands of games that come out on Steam every year, you have competition for games on steam Games are longer than ever because they're filled with content. NES area, you could finish a game in a few hours now, like a game is 20, 30, a hundred, 500 hours of content to play, and you're not only competing for game attention, you have streaming, you have music, you have all kinds of other things out there.

And we have tons of stats, whether it's ES, A or other places showing that the average gamer simply doesn't buy that many games, and it's just hard for them to consume all the content. Let me think if there are any other big ones that I didn't think of. I think that's probably it. I also think that the most successful games now that they have live services have a huge vetted interest in keeping people within those walled gardens and not letting them out.

And so if you look at the amount of time that goes to net titles, a smaller and smaller amount goes to [00:29:00] net new releases versus those. So I would say that those are the main factors I can think 

Alex: of. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was gonna say that last bit is something that we've Yeah, you know, have seen as well.

It's kind of the whole reason our company even exists is 

Aaron: Yeah, you only need Fortnite. Yeah. 

Alex: It's got everything. For sure. Okay. With that in mind, and thinking about like the future, do you have any thoughts of like what I was gonna ask you, what kind of jobs do you think exist in the coming years? The coming decade when I was coming out of high school?

We had our first computer. This one I'm pointing at my, the original Mac behind me. We had gotten that computer, like, uh, while I was in high school. I taught myself how to code. I went to college. I had no idea what I wanted to do when I grew up. I, I, at some point I decided I wanted to start a business. I knew how to write code, I liked games.

I wrote a game. There was no blueprints for industry [00:30:00] jobs or anything. You know, today it's very different. You can go to USC, get a degree in game design or one of many game programs, et cetera. But every few years, like trajectory, the kind that jobs that exist, it evolves and changes, you know, with ai, et cetera.

What do you think that the job openings look like in a few years? Or even a decade, 

Aaron: is it gonna 

Alex: get better? Well, yeah, that's part of it. 

Amir: You know, it's interesting, the, the nu the number one question. I will, I will choose Alex to hear your question with us. A bit of a, a twinge on it like Aaron was saying.

'cause the number one question I get answered that will also answer your question is like, Amir, when are things gonna get better and what does that look like in terms of what's gonna be available? Maybe kind of combining the two. Yeah. Set. I think some things will look the same and some will look different.

So the main points I would pick out is [00:31:00] first I can definitely see a reality where it's almost like development as a service where the amount of time and length of time the teams stay together. Ends up being either shorter or the kind of like natural breakup that comes after a release. Just becomes something that people now actually accept in terms of how things are constituted.

And so people more fluidly work move between projects and kind of the lines between primary studios that work on games and what a code dev or an Xev studio might do. Maybe become a little bit more blurred. I can see that. The second thing is I think the types of games that people make are gonna be.

Probably different. You have to change how studios are built up because they were built up for a very different cost structure and it's gonna be very hard and take time. But I think a [00:32:00] sustainable future is one with shorter games that are more kind of like idea games that maybe harken back to several console generations back that are like 3, 5, 10, 15 hours long max in terms of how people do them and in what functions.

Most functions I think will probably be okay. I actually studied for 20 functional categories that I look at. Which ones do I think potentially really are having a little bit of trouble? And the ones that have been hurt the most are writing narrative, qa, some parts of game design. Those are basically the three that having have had a little bit of the most trouble because some of those functions either have been reduced or maybe maybe could speculate that maybe they're on some type of level of automation or AI aided functionality.

The final comment that I'll make is [00:33:00] I actually have reasonable confidence, not just because I'm an optimistic person, that because I track for all those roles that I mentioned in my spreadsheet, I put a little tracker on every single one, so in a unique way that nobody else does. I can see how long roles stay open and how long it takes them to close both for the entire industry and by function.

So I have a sense of what like the sinusoidal function is of what's going on. As I was telling Dean Takahashi a while back. I believe in January trailing 60 day hiring and trailing 60 day layoffs actually hit an equilibrium. But the big question is where, and one of the biggest things that I think will change is, and this isn't quite function like you said, Alex, but I hope you'll allow me to say this, is that one thing I think about a lot is if you take the Americas, EMEA, and Asia and you look at [00:34:00] where the most roles are in our industry, up until 2022, north America always had the most open roles, and then EMEA and A PJ duked it out for two and three.

What has now happened is Asia is number one, EMEA is number two, and and Americas are number three. And in fact, last year in 2024. 53% of all global layoffs. Global layoffs happened in California. Yeah. And so when you put all this together with the cost of development in California, Seattle, et cetera, versus again, Europe and parts of Asia, as much as it pains me to say it, it is hard to not conclude in the data that there is a geographic shift that I almost think of in my head as a big arrow with the butt of the arrow in the west coast of the US and the head of the arrow say in Eastern Asia of gradually role shifting.

And we three could be here 10 [00:35:00] years from now and be like, well, the industry recovered at some macro level of total opportunities, but that mix of where they are could have completely changed. 

Aaron: That is really interesting. That was us, right? Alex? Were we a part of that 22, that 53%. Yeah, well, 

Alex: 23, but yeah, sure.

Aaron: 23. 

Alex: At the same time, we're seeing games like Blacksmith Wang and Marvel rivals and games that are coming from development centers outside of the US crushing it Sort really interesting, those two trends together. Is it too cynical to think the following? What I've heard from folks the last few months is that investors like AAA is, is, it's not dead, but it's like it's, it's now the domain of those like platform holders or those who can actually afford to take the, what is that?

A nine digit risk, eight digit [00:36:00] risk, you know, big risk. But where investment is gonna pick up is in the smaller games. Indie Triple I. Is that a thing? And you kind of said something similar about more games being built that are smaller in scope. But if we end up getting a lot more of those games, are we not gonna see the competitive landscape at that part of the market get untenable as well?

Aaron: Like saturated? 

Amir: Yeah, it, it's definitely possible and I think that it is hard to say. I think over supply of anything will create market problems. I think that what you were saying definitely could be possible and there could be another correction when we may be overcorrect in that direction. But what does seem clear to me is that if you were to try to provide a steady state of what the mix of production looked like, that you wanted to give you the best shot of getting back to some equilibrium [00:37:00] of jobs wherever they are, I think you have a better shot of having that model of a smaller number of kind of tent pole.

Ips and franchises that make the AAA games that are typically safer. And then the rest of the production goes to things that are maybe more cost or scope responsible. 

Alex: Makes sense. 

Amir: But it's not, I don't think it's a panacea. I think nothing's a panacea. 

Alex: Yeah. It is gonna be interesting to see how things evolve this year and next year, five, 10 years.

Who knows? I mean, that's like an AI forever. Yeah. All right. Different line of questions. I'm really curious about how you sort of navigate life, having a day job and a side hustle. And I don't know if you would refer to your game community as a side hustle, but you know, you answered a question. This is not 10 cents spinning.

It's my opinion. You obviously, you have a professional day career and you have this passion. This project that you're doing on the side? [00:38:00] What's that? What's that like for you? How do you like manage your time? How do you, how do you like emotionally compartmentalize? You know, like I ask, because we do this podcast, this is kind of like a side project attached to, you know, the main dish of having a day job.

So I, I could totally relate. So what's it like for you? 

Amir: The honest answer is I, I like to joke that it's like my three jobs and like the number one and most important job is being a dad of three boys and being a husband and a family member and a friend. The second job is the Tencent job, and then the third job is the community job.

'cause I have to do my day job, otherwise I can't do anything else. And so what I would say is I, I feel very happy that I have a super supportive wife who. Let me put in a lot of time, those first six months, starting in November 22 to kind of set up the community. It was [00:39:00] very difficult to balance. Then, I'll be honest, because I was putting in probably 20 to 30 hours a week doing that on top of my job, on top of the kids.

But I always put the kids first and like always the kids in the family first if I couldn't do something else. 

Alex: How, how, like what's the, the age range of your kids? How old are they in school? 

Amir: 6, 6, 4, 1. All boys. Okay. So that's, that's a lot of work. That's a work. Okay. And so it was, it was very intense there.

Thank you all boys too, 

Alex: huh? 

Amir: Yeah. All. Okay. And so it's, yeah, it's quite something, but that was very intense. But after that initial period passed. I can say that I can do all the community work, and some people don't believe it. They even think this sounds nuts. But I really can. I can do all the community work and the posting and everything that I do on LinkedIn in about 10 to 15 hours a week.

I've just become very efficient at it and I have processes for everything, but I also get help. The Discord community, for example, is 99% [00:40:00] autonomous. I have a group of mods who basically do everything. They're amazing for a lot of like the resources that I do for the community. I have people who help me with a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

And so I would say we have now achieved the steady state. That is pretty manageable. And in terms of when I do it, um, I, you know, my wife and I both drive to drive the kids to school together every single day. So I get up pretty early every day. I prepare my morning posts. Then I do the stuff with the kids.

I work until the afternoon, five to eight is family time. Then I finish whatever I have left for work. Then I finish whatever I have with the community. And so most days I do go to bed at like 1, 1 30 ish, some, something like that. But it's a six hours of sleep is enough and I sleep on the weekends. And, uh, and that's the truth of it.

Like, you know, I promise you honest answers and not candy coding it. But like, I'm so, I'm so deeply passionate about it. And now that I have all the data to show the [00:41:00] tangible impact that he's happening on people's lives, I, uh, I, it's just, it's so important I think other than playing games, reading and like other important things.

The only way you make it work, I think is by making something like this. Like the thing that you do after your job and your family. That's what I've done. 

Alex: Right on. Have, have you been able to measure the impact of the community? 

Amir: Yes. So we have helped 3,300 people find jobs. And you know, the thing that I'm really proud of is, if you think about the layoffs a little bit less than that, but about 10% of the jobs that have been lost, we've been able to place back with the help of our community.

And beyond that 3,300 like countless interviews, I frankly even just stopped counting. But like I am certain it's at least 10,000, maybe 15,000 in terms of interviews. But like beyond that, the thing that means the most to me, the most to me is [00:42:00] you can imagine it's very touching how many notes and communications I get from people.

But moreover, when I see them at events and they'll come up and they'll gimme a hug. They'll often have a tear in their eye. They'll tell me, you know, their house was gonna be foreclosed and our community helped them get a job, or we helped their partner get a job, or they felt like completely giving up on life.

The thing that I really love is the biggest thing people tell me that our community helps them with typically isn't even, oh, Amir, you helped us get a ticket to GDC, or You helped us get a mentor, or whatever. It's this sense of hope and feeling like they don't wanna give up and there's someone out there that cares about them, even if they felt like they were given up on by everybody else.

I. That's cool. 

Alex: That's, that's awesome. That's, that, that's gotta be just the best. I I, I saw you at Dice last month and I'm pretty sure the whole week I saw you at the same [00:43:00] spot across the hall from where that Starbucks is in the Aria Hotel swamped by people the entire time. That's cool. He's a very popular guy.

Aaron: Hey, are you, are you playing games now that you like, that you're doing all this work? Do you get to add to your big list or? 

Amir: I've really slowed down. I mean, to be honest, when I said front load and I really met foot loaded, do is 

Alex: working until 1:00 AM what do, what Has he got time to play? He's gotta play in his sleep.

Aaron: Yeah. Someone's gotta play all those games. No, 

Amir: the, the, the, the truth, the truth is as both of you know, those of us in the industry get really good at getting senses of games really quickly and so I would say most of the time I am playing. First off, things that I have to play, you know, for work for a few hours or whatever amount of time I need to have a sense of them.

And then I pick and choose the small number of things that I can play every year that I really want to. The first year the community started, I still was up there in the tens of games a year and [00:44:00] was able to get it done. 'cause there was like, there was better balancing. But now to be honest with you, the community takes up so much.

It's just, it's too difficult. Yeah. But I did get to play Civ seven. That was great. I got to play the wow extension. I get to play the stuff that really matters to me for sure. That's cool. Right. 

Alex: What is your day job like? Are you bd? Are you doing analysis? Are you like signing games? Are you, are you negotiating contracts?

What are you doing? 

Amir: Yeah, well, I mean, as you know, Alex BD varies so much from place to place at, at Tencent, the way it works is we have a, a. Uh, for all of Tencent's size, we have a team, a core team of about 10 folks in North America, six on BD and four in a capacity called Venture Lab, which is folks with like 25 plus years experience in some specific capacity production, marketing, et cetera.

And we really work as a close tandem. So yeah, to go out there and find studios that we think are really promising, that could be for [00:45:00] collaboration on new games based upon ip. It could be working together on publishing, it could be supporting them in, in any other facet that you could imagine. And so I, I would say the most, the most common scenario is typically coming together on a new game that we believe has potential typically within the areas that were classically Tencent Strong areas, which is.

Mobile live services also has opportunity in China. But as you saw with Blacksmith Wang, I think that has become much more expansive now and it has given the company a lot more confidence to what to look for. But there's no question that now compared to, say three years or five years ago before I was at Tenson, I think the company has definitely become more selective in picking and choosing its spots given it's already identified a lot of the low hanging fruit and the bigger opportunities.

So yeah, it's a lot of fun. And to be honest with you, I actually really love it because to your point at being at dice, something I love about being a bd, which is why I basically have done again that or strategy for so long, is I [00:46:00] love meeting people and it also, it it, I think Tencent and Amazon have really helped me and coached me.

Making it really symbiotic with the community in the sense that it's all just meeting people and trying to help them. And sometimes that's, I'm helping them with my professional hat on for Tencent, and sometimes it's, I'm helping them personally 'cause of what's going on in their career. So it's, it's all just meeting people and helping people, right?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. There's almost a therapeutic aspect to both those roles, I guess. Um, two questions actually. Uh, it makes me think. Can you describe maybe the best you can for folks, probably a lot of folks listening know about Tencent, but it's probably a lot of folks who, who aren't familiar with the company, the companies.

It's a, like I said, at the top, the largest video game company by revenue based in China. Could you describe a little bit of the scope of Tencent, like the games that Tencent's involved? I know Tencent was an [00:47:00] investor in League of Legends and Epic. I know they own, uh, is it wheat? Is it, uh. We, no, what's the name of the, the, um, WeChat Social Network in China?

WeChat. WeChat. It is WeChat, yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But could you describe a little bit like the, the footprint you know of Tencent for, for listeners? 

Amir: Oh, sure. You know, I think obviously many of the things we can't talk about, but I would say that the scope of Tencent, I really think about Tencent and I'm sure everyone has their own take on it, but particularly when I compare it to other big companies I've been in, like Amazon, like, you know, Dell, EMC, and so forth.

I think about Tencent as really first and foremost, even though of course they have many of their own great studios. I think about it as a premier games investor in the sense that if you looked at the biggest footprint of where Tencent is, it is in those relationships and trust that they've been able to build with [00:48:00] studios and invest in.

Really, I think it covers a much wider gamut than people think. So like you said, it covers things like, you know, riot in mobs, but we also have investments in people that do, you know, survival and extraction. And we do games that are like the smallest games that you can think of, for example, even more in our European markets.

But we also do the biggest ones. And so I would say it has a very diverse footprint. And I think the biggest surprise for me learning about it as an outsider group versus being on the inside is that it's not just like this narrow gamut of like mobile things or live service things or big things. I think we support a lot of different teams across a lot of different things.

Alex: Yeah. Was there, when you first joined and you were like looking at the whole list, were there, it sounds like there were maybe a couple that were surprising. What, what? What were those? 

Amir: There were I, I'll just, I'll just say that I was impressed at Tencent ability to. Be brave and to [00:49:00] take risks on a lot of independent things and smaller things that you know are not the things that you would think of as like sure bets and like the easy winners and stuff like that.

And many of those have worked out, as with many big companies. Some of them have not, but I thought that was pretty interesting. 

Alex: Okay. What's it like being part of Tencent, a Chinese company right now with the political environment in the us? Is it weird? 

Amir: The honest answer is it's, it's, it's really not. Like for now, I would say I don't really feel it.

Well, the honest answer is I don't feel it, but I think I don't feel it by design, which is why our team exists in the first place. I think the reason Tencent invested all this money in this team of people in North America is at the end of the day, all this stuff and all these matters for business. I think they're very personal and they're very local.

And so the relationships that we built and the companies I [00:50:00] knew, they're people that I've had relationships with for a long time. And I, I genuinely believe that, particularly with some of the bigger ones that I've known the longest, we have enough trust and enough personal relationships that I think that is the most important thing.

And, uh, I haven't seen an effect at least yet. 

Alex: Yeah, it seemed, you know, like, I think I remember like with the, um, by dance and the TikTok band and then Marvel Snap went down because by dance was the publisher. And then you read these stories about net ease kind of divesting out of their Western investments.

And I, I just curious if any of that has been sort of like systemic or reactionary to the political landscape here in the US or, or maybe that's not a topic. You don't really wanna talk, but I find it unfortunately fascinating. You know, kind of like one of 

Amir: those things. No, no, no. I, I, I, I genuinely am not being coy.

Like I can just say I am certainly aware that there are dynamics like that coming and certainly many of [00:51:00] us have read about some of those dynamics like at net ease and in other situations, like you mentioned with by dance. But I can really say on the ground as a BD for the team. It is pretty much so far, thank God, knock on wood, been business as usual.

I don't know if that will ever change, but like it's, it hasn't changed for now. 

Alex: Yeah. Right on. Right on. Cool. What are you looking forward to? What are you looking forward to in the industry or games coming up? What's your outlook for 2025? 

Amir: My outlook for 2025 is that I feel like we have two. Very big beats that are very, very important.

And I hope that they will both cast a little bit of sunshine at a time that we all desperately need them. One is the switch to, and I'm a huge Nintendo fan boy, fan person, and the second one is GTA six. And I have no reason to believe that both of those won't do incredibly well. I hope, as I do with any big release by anybody in our industry that they exceed [00:52:00] expectations.

If we look at the timeline, uh, they haven't had a, uh, let's see here. The last there was, there was Super Mario Wonder, but Odyssey was all the way back in 2017, and so timing would suggest that we're due for another Big Mario game, so that would be pretty, pretty awesome. 

Alex: Oh yeah, that's a really good point, Amir.

I think those are two huge beats this year, knock on wood. That potentially gets us back on this nice upward trajectory. It'd be a good story for the industry. 

Aaron: New steam deck too, I think. And new steam deck. Yeah. Is that, it's like, is that happening? I think so. This year maybe. Wait, is it just you think so?

Or did they announce it? Everyone thinks it's gonna happen this year. Towards the end of the year. I think 

Amir: they've been pretty hot rumors. 

Alex: Yeah, pretty hot rumors. Yeah. Rumors 

Amir: fish. Yeah. 

Alex: I'll be, uh, but, but, but, 

Amir: but you, you know, I'll, I love my Steve Deck. 

Alex: Yeah. 

Amir: I love, I love the Steve Deck too. It goes back to, you know, when you were, remember when you were asking about, well, if we, if we switched over to the smaller games, like, you [00:53:00] know, wouldn't that get saturated and maybe have problems too?

And what I was actually really thinking when you said that is like, you know what? He's right. But also I. I think we need these like health checks to make sure that like the big stuff that is supposed to kick butt still can kick butt the way it does. And so like, I, I, I imagine you both would agree, like seeing those two really kick butt, I think would make, would make everybody feel better.

Alex: Oh, absolutely. And I, you know, I honestly, like I was asking that question less about general health of the industry and just more about like, I'm, I'm a total optimist. There's, I think there's never a better time to be getting into this industry than the moment we're discussing, whether it's today or tomorrow or the week after.

Opportunity. Opportunity space is always growing. I mean, just take our company as another, as an example. Again, it's like this. Market that we're in didn't exist three years ago. Yeah, three years from now, there's gonna be a whole new set of things like the Switch too. A whole new set of things, you know, to kind of go after and [00:54:00] dig in.

So for me, that question about sort of like the, the influx of capital going into these smaller games on steam, will that sort of like cycle as well? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not. It's more less of a question about general industry health and more of a question about if I were thinking about getting into the industry now or starting something now, where would I start it?

Would I start it there or would I aim somewhere different? So I agree with you. I think that's, um, I think it'll be a great beat this year to get some industry growth. Again, at the macro level, 

Aaron: I can remember that there's always this like. Cycle, right? Like a console's, like in the, in the, it's, it's getting, all the games are, it's getting saturated with games.

People want the next console, another console's coming out, and then you start to see all these layoffs and studios shutting down and games, you know, 'cause everyone's like getting the other console or whatever, you know. Is this period different than those periods? Like, it's different, right? Is it because of the, the big covid push?

Or is [00:55:00] it, as long as I can remember, the industry's always had this like little window of everyone's getting laid off and then there's this huge like, hey, new consoles coming out, you know, everyone's getting jobs. You know, I would say the console crash in the eighties was different. The eighties one is different 

Alex: that everybody lost their jobs and they was doom and gloom.

No hope for the future when the whole Atari bust that whole thing. 

Aaron: And it took So is this like that you think it 

Alex: took the PlayStation to sort of bring everything back? Yeah, and I don't think it's that bad. I don't think it's as bad as it was then. I mean, from your's point, the industry got like, we hired a lot of people.

I think a lot of people from outside the industry came into the industry. I know there were a lot of engineers that were working on just internet stuff that came into games. So we had a huge expansion in In 2020. 

Amir: Yeah. No disagreement with any of that. I was just gonna add Aaron, that I think two things are a little bit different.

One thing that I think is different is you wonder [00:56:00] kind of like what the cons war cycle is gonna look like, right? Like PlayStation of one is now bringing everything to pc and so, and Xbox now is like, well, everything is an Xbox and so the hardware still matters, but it's changing. I think what that changes is still figuring itself out a little bit.

But another thing is. You know, I go back to where we started the conversation where Alex was asking what are the main factors. One that I actually realized I didn't mention that I should have mentioned is I think the novelty of new tech is changing. And what I mean by this is I'm a huge Sierra fan and I was watching, uh, Roberta Williams interview and she was talking about King's Quest.

And this wasn't the main point of what she was talking about, but she was talking about how every time they did a new King's quest, and as you both know, they did eight of them, she would go to Ken and the team. And it'd be like, oh, well the tech has changed. We have to [00:57:00] do something really different now.

How do we utilize the tech? And throughout my entire life as a gamer, the th the lives of all three of us as gamers, it's like every time a new gamer console came, something changed NES to SE and yess. Then you went to 3D. Then by the time I was in college, it was like World of Warcraft. Well now we have online play.

Then there was VR 4K HDR. And we've kind of hit a point now where there's not that thing to put on the table that gets everyone to go out and buy the new stuff and buy the new exclusives. And so I really believe, although people don't talk about it much, that lack of like a hardware and innovation thrust that people feel in that sense, I think that that's kind of one of the challenges as well.

Alex: Hmm. That's a really interest. Yeah. Hey, I'm 

Amir: like, I, 

Alex: that's a good idea. I'm getting a URL. You're out, Aaron. Great. Let's go. Yeah. 

Amir: A lot of people say ar like, I, I wonder, I [00:58:00] actually, if I had to bet, I don't, I mean, who knows, but I actually wouldn't bet on vr. I would bet on ar and I bet if they could get ar really inexpensive and light and impressive, maybe that would be a possibility.

Who knows? 

Alex: Yeah. Aaron's just waiting for the implant. He's, he is first of all, ready get that implant so he can just, no, 

Aaron: I'm not getting hook himself up to the matrix. I, you know, I actually think something I've been seeing, I don't know if you've seen this, but I've seen, uh, they're taking old game footage like from like the PS one era, and then they have AI redraw it.

And it looks amazing. It like the graphics look realistic. It's really cool. Huh? I think that might be like a, a little gimmick that comes out soon. AI graphics. 

Alex: Interesting. That's cool. Yeah. Who knows? I think this conversation a couple years from now is gonna be very different. Like just the speed of which changing.

We're just be 

Aaron: staring at the screen. We're gonna be communicating her way. 

Alex: I'm not getting a chip either. Neither am I. Especially if it's Elon's [00:59:00] chip. I ain't getting a chip. No way. No way. Don't do it guys. You see how many times that's that. I mean, the spaceships and everything are fricking cool, but they crash all the time.

I don't want to crash or get the virus. All right, Amir, I apologize for, you know, the last question Aaron asked, I realized I just jumped in and, and tried answering it in front of you, so no bad. No, not at all. Bad. Bad. Not at all. Bad, bad. It's all 1 0 1. Thank you. Thank you Amir, for hanging out with us.

Super fun conversation. Yeah, that great. I, we'd love to hang out. IRL, if are you going up to GDC, we should hang out and just awesome stuff that you're doing with the community. I know it's had such a, I mean, you've got the quant on it. It's got such a positive impact, both actual results, but also karma.

And I just wish the world was filled with more people like you. 

Amir: Oh, thank you. Well, I really, really, really love games and like, you know, I feel like the best way you can say thank you in [01:00:00] addition to saying thank you is actually helping people in like, the toughest, toughest part. So I really appreciate you guys and, and you know, everybody out there who thinks that this stuff matters and is worth talking about on podcasts and conversations.

'cause it's not just about Amir, it's about many people like me out there who are all trying to make the industry better. And I'm, I'm proud of all of them. 

Alex: Right on. Right on. Oh, thanks again. We'll see you around. Yeah. Thanks Amir. Thanks dudes. We've had coyotes in the neighborhood. I saw. Yeah. That's crazy.

There is a I'll kill dogs. Oh, no, I know. And you told, actually, you told me that. Yeah, they, they, they will go after, and they're very opportunistic, but there's a three legged coyote in our neighborhood and he looks pretty healthy, other than the fact that he's missing a foot, so they could go with just three legs, you know?

That's impressive. All right. Amir said a couple of interesting things, some of which I think are possibly really impactful 

Aaron: for [01:01:00] the game industry, but there's one thing he said, you know, when he mentioned that spreadsheet that he did? Mm-hmm. Right? Doesn't he have like a spreadsheet of like all the numbers?

Alex: Oh, yeah. He scrapes all the sites and all the jobs and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. 

Aaron: Yeah. Well, no, no, not that one. He made another one. What I wanted to say was that he's doing the spreadsheet thing. I never understood it. So whenever I heard him talking about the spreadsheets and like how he was mentioning now, I think he has a spreadsheet for every game he's ever played.

Right? Oh, right, right. Yes. Okay. That yes. Yeah, that part. So I started making one the other day for my wife and I understood what he meant. You know, you're making it like, you know, we could track this too. Of course we can like, we can track that and like we can multiply and divide it. We can get this information.

And it was just like, before you know it, you have like 50 lines and she is like, what are you doing man? Like it's really cool when you put a number here, it like updates all these other numbers and like, so spreadsheets [01:02:00] are awesome. I do like me a good spreadsheet. I do like me a good spreadsheet. Yeah. I need be colorized.

I love it too. Is there a game? 

Alex: Is there a game? That's, that was, that is a spreadsheet. Has anybody done a game like in Excel? I think could, I think it's, it's Eve online. Eve Online. He called Eve Online. Damn. Okay. That's pretty interesting. I, here's what I heard him say, which. I don't know how to feel about, which is he was saying like tracking all of the job listings and watching them, how they get filled and stuff.

Mm-hmm. He, he said the quote, it's like a giant arrow with the base in California and the tip in East Asia, meaning like all of these triple A or like high paying jobs that have been in the industry, particularly in California, where the mm-hmm. You know, the tax base is high, the cost of living is high and salaries are high.

Like ever since the pandemic and work from anywhere and pricing pressure and [01:03:00] contraction in the industry has pushed a lot of the jobs to lower cost employment zones where the talent is just as good and the ambition is even higher and the cost is much lower. That's a trend that, these are not my words.

This is what a Amir is saying. Mm-hmm. And actually I kind of believe it, you know? So what does that mean? What does that mean for our industry? Like for most of the history of games, there's been a lot of talk about how the price, effective price of a game hasn't changed, even though the cost has gone up a lot.

But I think what has enabled sort of that oddity of economics is that our industry has just continued to grow. You know, it's, when I say industry has grown, like more dollars are coming in because more people are playing games and people are playing more games and it's gone from basement hobby to mainstream pastime.

You know, 

Aaron: no kid grows 

Alex: up today 

Aaron: without playing video games, you know? Yeah. You can't avoid 'em. They're, they're even in school, right? 

Alex: [01:04:00] Yeah. But like, is that kind of growth slowing? Is that why we're seeing such pressure on the industry and not slowing, but like, what do you mean pressure? I don't understand.

You were saying the last few years, the, the reason why Amir has this whole community is to help people find jobs because there's been this contraction in the industry. 10,000 people lost their jobs last year. 

Aaron: Oh, the, yeah, it's like a wave. It's like the, the tide came in, the tide went away, and now there's, like you're saying like, what's going on?

Because all these people don't have jobs and we need to find jobs for them. And then those jobs are being filled in Asia. And, you know, the, the 

Alex: industry kind of went global from a consumer perspective. Hey, that's awesome growth and it's going. Global from a game making perspective as well. Yeah. 

Aaron: It's very saturated too right now.

And a lot of people are only playing one game or two in their life. You know, where or Yeah. Like an 

Alex: older game. [01:05:00] Yeah. Yeah. Who are we talking to? Somebody we were talking to who's like, has been playing. Oh, I, I, I met with, uh, I was meeting with this guy the other day and he was telling me about how he's and a group of friends of him have been playing Team Fortress two since it came out.

Yeah. That's like 20 years. Yeah. And they, and they're actually, I think there's, it's the 20th anniversary of that game. Yeah. And they're like, Hey, we're, we're all gonna get, like, we all live in different places. We're all gonna go, we're all gonna go get together in Austin. You know, so we could play in person like we used to.

Yeah. Land party. And he, and he is like, we're not gonna switch to a different game. We're too old to learn some new, we're not gonna go learn some new game. Forget it. Like we're, this is our game. It's like, it's like me and tennis. It's like, screw pickleball. I'm not gonna go play pickleball. I got, I'm way too invested in tennis.

Aaron: In tennis. 

Alex: I got a whole room of tennis rackets. 

Aaron: Like, 

Alex: forget it. 

Aaron: You could sell 'em on eBay. But, you know, the thing is with, with that, the games are supporting that Team Fortress, I wouldn't say is super [01:06:00] supportive of that. Like it takes a lot of, of the community and the people playing it to kind of get that games like Fortnite, you don't have to lift a finger, right?

Like if you get a new computer, it works like Team Fortress. You gotta like, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like you, or maybe not, but like you get, there's not like servers that are always on, or maybe there is, but maybe talking Well 

Alex: audience, this is not a plug for what we're doing, but this is, I think, related to our thesis at, at our 

Aaron: company.

I saw a meme about that. There was like, it was a negative on this actually. To kind of back up what you're saying, the meme was, I. People that grew up in the eighties to nineties or something, or eighties to two thousands, they had like a whole like spectrum of games. It was like Mario Tomb Raider and Dead Space and you know, this huge like spectrum of games, call of Duty.

And, and then underneath it it said, and I can't remember the generation, you know how they make like Gen Z and Boomer. So it was one of those Uhhuh [01:07:00] and they just had Fortnite like. For 10 years. And I'm like, that's true. I have a cousin who only plays Fortnite. They've been playing Fortnite since Fortnite came out, and they haven't changed.

They, they don't buy new games. All their money goes into Fortnite. 

Amir: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Aaron: So the meme is like, there's no diversity for them. You know, like, well now there is, 'cause there is the UE, the the UEFN stuff. Right. Right, 

Alex: right, right. Yeah. Well that was my, that was gonna be my point, is that there is an evolution happening where there are these software platforms.

Now, I think Roblox is an even better example. I mean, if you look at how many people are playing Dress to Impress and games like Brookhaven, et cetera, I think that's gonna be the Minecraft movie 10 years from now, you know? Yeah. Like the Brookhaven, the movie. I, I bet we'll see. It 

Aaron: wouldn't be surprised.

Alex: Yeah. 

Aaron: It's really weird, man. What's happening? And the AI stuff is moving so fast. Dude, it's, I 

Alex: replace Weird with exciting. It's really exciting. I mean, okay, it's [01:08:00] change. Change is hard and it could be weird, but like that's the one consistent thing about our industry. This business is there's always something happening and there's always something new.

There's always some new tech. Sometimes it promises to be something you can't deliver, like vr. Maybe we'll get there, but we haven't yet. Oh, it's totally gonna get there. All of it. Yeah. But it's gonna get there. It's something that's just so transformative and amazing like the internet and 3D, and let's see where AI takes us.

Guess. Oh, I could tell you where it's gonna take us. Can 

Aaron: I give you my guess? I know you're like, Aaron, shut up. But 

Alex: lemme tell you the dumpster, it's gonna take us straight to the dumpster. 

Aaron: No, no. I think the first, this is where it's gonna blow everyone's mind. Right now in our industry, we have programmers and we have artists that work really hard for their, like coming up with style and, and learning the 3D software and learning how to paint and all this stuff.

I think it's gonna get to the point where everything is rudimentary. Like it's just like a mannequin on a [01:09:00] gray. Like, you know, like, you know how we, you know how whenever we make like a test level and want to play a test level, like a gray box, like a gray box level, right? Like a block out and we're like jumping around in there and the character's not done, the animations aren't done, the level's not done.

I think that's gonna be what it's gonna be. And AI is gonna draw on top of that. So it's gonna know the character and you're gonna say, I want that to be crot and it'll render. You'll never have to model Lara Crot. You'll say, I want this to be realistic graphics and it'll make, you know, and I'm already seen videos of this.

People are taking like old game game footage and the AI is like re rendering it and like realism. 

Alex: Yeah. Some of that is kind of freaky 

Aaron: and it's gonna be real time, dude. It's kind of freaky. Yeah, that's gonna be real time. So it's not gonna be computer graphics. It's gonna be video. 

Alex: Okay. Alright. I was trying to like ride us out on an optimistic, sorry, the listeners are, what's going on?

Alright, I'm sorry. Okay, close it out Alex.[01:10:00] 

The world is our oyster. All right, well, I hope you enjoyed our conversation with Amir and are a little bit of rambling at the end there, and we'll see you next time. 

Aaron: Yeah. See you next time, everybody, and watch out for ai.

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