Remote working down, mid-level contraction, and Eastern migration: the signals we’re seeing in games job data

Nate Head is chief sorcerer at the gaming jobs platform Sorcery.gg.

Sorcery.gg has been collecting a deep pool of hiring data across the games industry over the past year, tracking the availability of roles at over 620 studios. The overall story that the data tells is interesting in itself, but it’s the nuance that makes it fascinating.

The overarching theme is that the games industry is not in freefall, but it is in a significant period of upheaval. There are tectonic shifts happening beneath the feet of game developers, as teams are being disbanded in certain geographies and scaled in others.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that there has been a general decline in the availability of jobs in the games industry across 2025. According to the data, the net contraction in available jobs is around 4% globally: in other words, there are 4% fewer jobs available now than there were at the start of last year. But this doesn’t tell the full story. For the majority of 2025, the amount of overall jobs available was above this level, and even above that of January last year.

For the first nine months of 2025, it seemed the likely explanation for the downward trend was what we all might have expected: the rise of AI.

AI-associated roles saw explosive growth, with three times as many AI roles available in September when compared with January. But it seems that this push into AI has faltered in recent months, with the numbers of open roles crashing back down to where they were at the start of last year.

Although this doesn’t tell the full story of the games industry’s relationship with AI, it seems there is less urgency in studios’ adoption of the technology now than there was six months ago. Perhaps a cautiously optimistic indicator for any devs worried that AI is coming for their job any time soon.

The global contraction in roles has been largely led by a decimation of the US games jobs market, which has seen a massive drop off in new roles posted. The peak came in May, when nearly 50% of all newly posted roles were in the US, but this fell to just 20% of roles in December and January. The overall number of open jobs in the US is down 25%. The UK, Western Europe, and the Nordics have also seen declines, although nowhere near as dramatic, at around 13–15%.

Eastward migration

With such a steep drop off in jobs in the US and Europe, but a more measured decline globally, does that mean there is growth elsewhere?

China and the US have been competing for the top spot as the largest dev centres across 2025, with the US in the lead for most of that time. But as of December and January, China has overtaken the US, seeing 25% growth in new job availability. This is the first time it has held the lead for two consecutive months, which might be an indicator for the future of these job markets.

This eastward migration of jobs is seemingly part of a wider trend, as Eastern Europe and South/South East Asia both saw nearly 50% growth throughout most of 2025 (although it has tapered in recent months). Canada, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, given its under-appreciated game dev pedigree), is bucking this trend, and has seen a 20% increase in available roles year over year.

This chimes with earlier reporting from Amir Satvat that as many as 75% of the layoffs have occurred in North America and statements from Lirui Ding (principal at the gaming venture capital firm Transcend Fund) and Chris Petrovic (chief business officer of FunPlus) that there is a lot of investment focus on Eastern developers. We’ve certainly seen Western audiences taking more notice of Chinese made and influenced games.

Are junior roles disappearing?

Part of the question around the restructuring of the games industry is what’s happening with role seniority. Anecdotally, we hear that junior roles are disappearing, as teams tighten budgets and focus on established experience. Does the data support this? The answer is that it depends on where you are.

The US is overwhelmingly moving towards more experienced teams, with management and leadership positions increasing, but mid-level positions falling. Senior positions went from making up 22% of new roles to 27%. Leadership roles represented 26% of hiring, while mid-level positions fell from 51% to 42% of open roles.

Canada is following similar trends to the US, seeing its mid-level positions drop from 56% to 50% and senior roles going from 20% in early 2025 to 27% more recently. This makes sense in the broader context of North American studios concentrating on cost reduction, focusing on smaller, more experienced teams. Junior roles bounced around at 4–5%, but it was mainly the mid-level roles that got squeezed out.

European juniors and aspirants who are hoping to make their way into the industry have had an encouraging year, with junior positions seeing a general upwards trend. The share of open roles for aspirants doubled in places like France, Germany, and Spain, up from 5% to over 10%. In Eastern Europe, the junior roles available doubled over the year (although they still only make up 6% of overall open roles). This suggests that European studios at least are developing and leaning into their own talent pipelines.

“Junior roles bounced around at 4–5%, but it was mainly the mid-level roles that got squeezed out”

UK juniors are in a similar position to the one they were in a year ago. The UK market for juniors stayed basically flat, bouncing around at 4–6% of available roles. It’s good to see that studios aren’t backing away from junior hiring, but they also aren’t scaling it up.

These seniority shifts fit the narrative that the industry is moving away from a Western-dominated development landscape. It seems that as team sizes shrink in the West, with the focus instead on experience and seniority, Eastern teams are growing, potentially indicating a broader shift in how games are made. A shift where, rather than being made by huge teams under the umbrella of one studio, larger games are being made more collaboratively by distributed teams of specialist companies across the globe. There are seemingly opportunities for co-development studios in this new landscape.

Remote working

With this regional shift, what’s happening to remote work? Since COVID, many teams have become distributed and remote, but more recently we’ve seen more return-to-office mandates from companies, and a perception that remote working is being scaled back.

The data does seem to show that the structural changes we saw to working arrangements over COVID are slowly being reversed. Globally, remote working arrangements are down from 9.4% to 6.6%, representing a 30% drop in available remote positions. Hybrid arrangements are down from 38% to 34%, while on-site positions have increased, up from 52% to 59%. This is a win for anyone who prefers to work face-to-face as part of a team, but will represent a challenge for those who have structured their lives around the flexibility afforded by remote or hybrid working.

One of the benefits of hiring remotely is gaining access to the global talent pool, so this move back towards on-site positions might make it harder for studios that are hiring teams. It does, however, represent an opportunity for small, flexible studios, which can increase their attractiveness to candidates via remote options.

The takeaway

What does this global shift mean for developers generally?

There is no doubt that the games industry is a competitive space, and becoming more so. The overall picture, however, isn’t as grim as it might seem. Although this doesn’t lessen the personal impact to those who have been laid off, it shows that the games industry isn’t imploding. Instead, it is undergoing a number of structural shifts, technologically, geographically, and financially.

Individual developers need to do everything they can to stand out in an increasingly competitive market. They need to ensure that their CVs and portfolios are polished, their skills are sharpened, their networks are nurtured, and that they are prepared for in office or hybrid working arrangements if possible. Studios need to ensure that their hiring processes respect the time and emotional investment of their candidates, while making it easier for busy hiring managers to identify the right fit. And everyone needs to remember that there are humans on both sides of the table.