Grace Gillam

Great list of companies and resources here -- bookmark this one!

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LinkedIn's New Gaming Adventure! LinkedIn has entered the gaming arena with the launch of three intriguing puzzle games – Pinpoint, Queens, and Crossclimb. These games are now available on both desktop and mobile platforms, adding a fun twist to the LinkedIn experience. Each game offers a unique mental challenge, including word association, trivia with wordplay, and a distinctive take on sudoku. This move reflects a broader trend in the digital content industry, as companies leverage gaming content to attract and retain users. Amid the challenges of generating revenue from traditional advertising, offering gaming content is seen as a strategic move to enhance user retention and possibly create new revenue streams in the future. LinkedIn's current strategy primarily focuses on user engagement without monetization. The games are free to play and embrace the social aspect of gaming by allowing users to view their connections' activity and engage in friendly competition through leaderboards. This approach represents a shift towards creating a more interactive and social experience within the professional networking platform. With the gaming landscape evolving across various industries, from digital news organizations to platforms like Netflix, LinkedIn's entry into gaming reflects an effort to adapt to user preferences and behaviors. As the company aims to deepen relationships and inject fun into the professional networking experience, it will be fascinating to see how these gaming features influence user engagement and potentially drive future business opportunities on the platform. https://lnkd.in/dsc7eePJ Play the games here https://lnkd.in/dqM7dBW4

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🎮Proud Support for Our Team at Digital Dragons❗️🚀 Our colleagues Michael Kubiak and Magdalena Grzesiak are set to attend Digital Dragons 2024, and though I’m not there in person, I’m with them in spirit!🔥 Our work together at GamerSEO supports this kind of industry engagement. Join me in cheering them on as they represent us and explore how we’re transforming game marketing. More updates to follow from the event! #DigitalDragons2024 #GamerSEO #DigitalMarketing #GamingIndustry

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😉 Learn more about how our young professionals start their dreams from Wargaming's Shanghai office!

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EA's Potential Shift Towards Aggressive In-Game Ads Electronic Arts (EA) is reportedly considering implementing more aggressive in-game advertisements in its AAA titles. This move aligns with broader industry trends, as companies seek alternative revenue streams beyond traditional game sales. The potential shift in ad policy has sparked concerns among gamers and industry observers. Players and fans are closely watching how EA navigates this possible change, especially as some of its major franchises are not releasing new titles in 2024. EA's emphasis on "thoughtful implementations" underscores the delicate balance between revenue generation and maintaining player satisfaction and trust. The impact of enhanced in-game ads on upcoming titles remains uncertain, and the gaming community will be closely monitoring the situation. More aggressive in-game advertisements reflect a strategic shift in EA's monetization approach, raising important questions about player experiences and industry trends. In your opinion, how might this move by EA affect player engagement and trust in the company's gaming titles? https://lnkd.in/eHiJ_ZPG

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Right, it's been a while so let's do one of my favourite things: hawk my newsletter to the lovely LinkedIn punters. Video Games Industry Memo comes out every Thursday morning with the mission to explain games to you in 15 minutes flat. Each newsletter is stuffed with: 🤔 One big read that unpicks a topic shaping the industry 📰 Five news hits to help you get across the news agenda 💼 The job movers and job vacancies in games worth checking out 📅 Events and conferences worth keeping an eye on 🎮 And three video game releases to play over the weekend The feedback on VGIM from my 1450 subs has generally been tip top, with readers describing it as "the gold standard of industry newsletters" and "like having a conversation with you every time I read it." Get subscribed to the newsletter ahead of tomorrow's edition, which looks closely at the fortunes of Embracer Group 👀 https://lnkd.in/eEd6mCPM

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The Sumo Group closures really have broken me a bit, and I need to rant about the state of things. I'm sorry if it seems I'm glossing over all the closures before this one, but so many ex-students went there, so many ex-colleagues passed through there, and so my timeline is just filled with people looking for work. We keep talking and talking about the economic factors involved, Brexit and Covid and this and that ... the thing I can't stop thinking of is that in my life I've watched the world slowly pitch into a place of despondent capitalism. Art has become more about making stars and fame than helping people escape and reflect. A drive for "truth" and objectivity has resulted, paradoxically, in people putting more stock in spreadsheets and numbers than people. I can't help but feel that if you're bleating about finance and trade deals and business decisions, you're ignoring the fact that general support for artistic and creative endeavours has declined sharply and is still declining, even in the so-called "art world". Games are ultimately always going to be the first to fall in a culture war against creativity, because games are ultimately and profoundly pointless things. That's the whole majesty of the medium: they make us feel profound feelings, they help us explore our existence by being separate from reality, but to do so they MUST bring us nothing tangible in return. The truth is that our industry will probably bounce back to some degree, but it's not any financial structures or cost systems that will save game development as a medium and an art form - it's a cultural shift to recognise the importance of expressive and explorative subjective art in the world today, and the need to support creative endeavours without the pressure of financial recompense.

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"With big video games missing, indie games are filling the void". This the headline from a Bloomberg article a couple of weeks ago and I have to agree. 2024 is set to be a big year for small games studios. One of my favourite games of 2024 so far is Balatro, a solo developed poker-themed roguelike deck-building game. This game hit 1M sales in less than a month. And I must have talked about it so much that my pal 🐨 Rory Jennings got me a physical deck for my birthday (thanks friend!). Animal Well, another solo developed title, launched last month with a 91% Metacritic score. Palworld released in January with a production budget of $6.7M and sold 15M copies on Steam in its first month and broke a Game Pass record for third-party launches. Lethal Company, yet another solo developed game, launched in October 2023 and has surpassed $100M in sales. And the list goes on. I love that world class, memory making, art forming, industry disrupting games can be built from anyone anywhere. The craft is being democratised and that's down to the whole ecosystem opening up and enabling creators. Education, tools, infrastructure and publishing have all gone through major changes resulting in tearing down walled gardens. The only question is, what should I play next? 🤔

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Dear Hiring Managers, Don’t hunt for treasures. Cultivate your own gems! Last week, we finished our 2nd cohort of students for the Game LiveOps course at Wargaming Forge. Shaky headhunting → stable talent forge. It’s simple: it's a give-and-take process. 🤝 1. Create a Free Course: We spent 6 months crafting an online course, including our products examples. 2. Arrange Enrolment: Partnering with local universities, we got 700+ applications in 2 weeks. 3. Start 𝖤̶𝖽̶𝗎̶𝖼̶𝖺̶𝗍̶𝗂̶𝗈̶𝗇̶ Onboarding: Homework is challenging, with strict deadlines, like in real business. After three months of teamwork, 11 out of 15 students graduated. Welcome 11 future colleagues! 👋 Aleksandr Dutov Andrej Trezov Anna Song Daniil Varshaver Diačenko Emil Eugene Kozii Jan Potancok Marios Kitrou Milan Vukov Milan Stefanovic Ted Fristedt I want to help young talents succeed in gaming and achieve a fulfilling future. With that → ‘positive, real’ life. P.S. Where did your gaming career start? I’ll start with myself: 🌞 2012, Wargaming, World of Tanks Blitz.

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🎮Monthly External Game Dev Pulse🎮 I’m on a personal mission to broaden my awareness and gain an ongoing pulse into the landscape of External Development in the Video Games industry. Video Games is an industry that I have been employed in for nearly 20 years, with External Development covering much of this tenure. I love it, I live and breathe it, and I’ll be doing this until I’m much older and wrinklier. I care about seeing this industry continuing to thrive, and I believe that the flexibility, scalability, and diversity of expertise in External Development can be a key component in supporting the industry as the landscape begins to (hopefully) restabilize. As such, I am starting a monthly pulse survey to gain regular snapshots in time of the industry-wide vision on External Development, with an aim to provide Video Games professionals the data needed to lean on external development to create increased development stability. To help with this mission, I am asking the community to please take 5-10 minutes completing this 5-question survey. I plan to release these pulse surveys on a monthly basis, and as a thank you I will share key data and insights with this community on Linkedin. This survey is open to participation for those working in External Development in the Video Games industry as a Service Provider, Developer or Publisher. I hope that this personal initiative will help many throughout the industry, whether you are involved in external development, hoping to learn more about external development, or interested in learning more about options for industry stabilization. I hope for a large pool of diverse participants, so if you see the value in this initiative please do share this post with your network. If you have any feedback for how the most can be made of this initiative, or improve the questionnaire for future releases, please let me know your perspectives through a Linkedin message. Thank you.

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I get to work with some very talented people on my team here on DC Universe Online, several of whom worked for years at Cryptic Studios on Star Trek Online. So naturally, we have a lot of great quotes to pull from both franchises. This morning, one of those quotes came up again and reminded me of how many people are agonizing over rejection emails they're getting right now. Having just interviewed several fantastic people for a role I opened here, I know nearly all of them are about to get a rejection email from us. I want you all to know something: it's not because you necessarily did ANYTHING wrong. You could have done everything right, but still lost out. Your qualifications and references were enough to get you on a call with a hiring manager like me in the first place. You got to speak with members of my team and while not all of the feedback may have been perfect, I assure you that no one we hire ever gets by unscathed, either. So yeah, as Patrick Stewart reminds us in his role as Captain Jean Luc Picard, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” Don't get caught up in what you could have done differently. Don't agonize over minute details, inflections in your voice, if your facial expression wasn't genuine enough, if your answer was too rambly - you may not have made any mistakes at all, honestly. Someone else just matched the specific team fit slightly better, or had slightly better experience in a slightly different area, or scored in some other category just slightly better. It's possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. Get up, brush yourself off and as we're told... Leave your hesitation and your self-doubt behind. You've got more calls to prep for and one of these days, it's going to be you who ends up scoring just ever so slightly better in a category or two. And here's the real secret - you'll invariably make mistakes on the interview you finally nail, anyway. #gameindustry #getbusyliving #youvegotthis #opentowork #hiring #boldlygo

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Should the Gaming Industry Prioritize Reliable Game Models Over Chasing Unicorn Games? The gaming industry currently faces a significant challenge as publishers prioritize rare and highly valued "unicorn" games over more reliable ones. An example of this is "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League," a game that spent nearly a decade in development, aiming to become a breakout live-service success like popular titles such as Destiny 2 and Fortnite. However, the pursuit of these unicorn games often involves immense financial investment and high expectations, making it challenging for such games to break even or achieve true success. Rather than focusing solely on unicorn games, it's suggested that publishers should consider investing in more reliable and sustainable game models, like the approach successfully demonstrated by Tango Gameworks with a smaller scale game called "Hi-Fi Rush." Do you agree that the gaming industry should reassess its focus on rare and highly valued "unicorn" games in favor of more sustainable and reliable approaches? What are your thoughts on the challenges faced by unicorn games in terms of financial investment, and do you believe that investing in more stable game models might lead to a more sustainable and successful gaming industry? Let's start a conversation! https://lnkd.in/ekbNdcff

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My latest blog post just went up on the Skillsearch Website This time, looking at how to improve your #3DArt portfolio with three simple tweaks and tips that we have collected from conversations directly with a range of studios and hiring managers. What are your thoughts on this blog? It would be great to hear in the comments below! #3d #gameart #portfolio #games #gamesjobs

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Games Jobs Workbook v14.1 Is Here (Please Help Repost) https://lnkd.in/d6x5NHMZ - Resource 8 We now have: - 2,760 games employers (+632) - 982 games employers who are actively hiring (+101) - 13,359 games jobs (+368) In terms of secondary statistics (when I say "ever," I mean since I started tracking data in November 2022): - Jobs are the least concentrated by employer ever. The top 10 employers have 4,993 jobs, or 37%. The top 27 employers have 6,706 jobs, or 50%. - Jobs are the least concentrated by function ever, although still fairly concentrated. The top three functions have 61% of all jobs, and the top four have 70%. Engineering, Programming, Tech Design, Tech Writing = 29% Art, Tech Art, Animation, Cinematics & Video = 21% Game Design = 11% Production, Project Management, Business + Communication Ops, Performance = 9% - The average number of jobs per employer is 14. - The median number of jobs per employer is 4. - Of the 982 games employers currently hiring: 264 are fully remote (27%) 118 have some remote jobs (12%), so 40% of games employers have some remote jobs. 600 are all hybrid or onsite (61%). - Of the 982 games employers currently hiring: 1,322 jobs are fully remote (10%). 2,686 jobs are at employers who have some remote jobs (20%), so 30% of jobs are at games employers who have some remote jobs. 9,351 jobs are at employers who are all hybrid or onsite (70%). - You can expect 939 additional games companies in v14.2. I am breaking this large update into v14.1 and v14.2 after all, just because I need a bit more time for testing on the second installment. Thanks, as always, to my dear friend Eva Tucker for feeding me this list of new adds, to which I have added URLs and locations where they were missing, eliminated companies that are defunct or without sites, and added the full functional level of detail in the games jobs workbook. All these new companies are now also 99% semi-automated through my standard approach. Please enjoy this even bigger, largest directory of games jobs in the world!

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Excited to reconnect with my gaming family at the upcoming event! If you’re attending, let's catch up! Now, a bit about my professional focus: Developers - Expert back-end development for smooth gameplay - Co-dev partners with credits from top games like CoD - Business advice on self-publishing vs. platform distribution - Cross-platform solutions for friends lists, leaderboards, achievements - Hybrid on-prem and cloud infrastructure for global deployment Publishers - Expanding Steam distribution to over 130 other stores AI Enthusiasts - Discussing all things AI - Reimagining performance marketing, influencer strategies, IRL-to-TikTok content, and community insights - Comms writers who need real-time social media context, especially on TikTok and Twitter (X) Licensing Experts - Developers for projects suitable for your IP - Kids game authentication modules for age/gender verification, looking at Hasbro & Mattel CEOs - Honest discussions about your business model (ARR vs. project-based revenue) Creative Media Agencies - Using AI to streamline social media departments - Crafting authentic brand collaborations (think Burger King & Stevenage Football Club) Ad Networks - Navigating IDFA changes with AI, LLMs, and social networks - Creating custom segments based on current IRL conversations Telecom Companies (BT Group, stc) - Integrating games into communities with PII benefits - Restoring eCPMs for F2P games through data enrichment and AI LLMs Monetization Experts - Exploring IRL-to-virtual and back again monetization strategies - Innovative ways to monetize virtual worlds, including IRL extensions Sherry Cask Scotch Enthusiasts - Finding and enjoying the best in Malmo Cigar Aficionados - Same as above! Consulting Models - Balancing professional life with family priorities Roblox x Fortnite x Meta - Discussing the potential of core gameplay in Roblox & Fortnite and meta-games on Meta Looking forward to meaningful conversations and some great cigars!

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Tiffany & Co. talking about a return to normal. The key take away is that we should all look for areas that are employed earlier in the pipeline from our particular skillsets. So, for Animation, look for Pre-Production; storyboard artists, character designers, layout and background, etc. opportunities being posted and hired for. If they are getting hired, that means productions are starting up again - that production ball is starting to roll. I'm seeing studios hire recruiters again - that's a good sign, you don't need to hire the people whose key job metric is souring and hiring other people if you are not planning to move ahead with a production. It's still slow, I won't downplay that - but there are cracks in the ice. And please know that while everyone is saying that this is the Worst it has Ever Been, that phrase gets tossed around quite a bit whenever these "market adjustments" happen. It's kinda like when someone says, "This is the best slice of pizza I have ever had!" - really? Is it, or were you just really hungry and in the mood for pizza? I'm not here to in anyway diminish the struggle, it's very real and it's very hard on those affected and those who love and care for them, but there is hope - as everything, including this market downturn, is temporary.

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News: Hiring Market Update - June 24 (Games & Tech) I pick up where we left off in March and cover off the rise in solo game devs along with the latest tech funding news and implications for the wider job market. You can also get the latest on the projects I'm working on. Studio Vision Podcast

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