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Business Insider
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
The ex-Amazon employee who's helped nearly 4,000 laid-off workers score jobs
A few years after Amir Satvat landed his first video-game job at the age of 38, layoffs started piling up across the industry at companies such as Xbox maker Microsoft and publisher Electronic Arts. Seeing many of his new peers let go, he became motivated to lend a hand. Satvat built a website and filled it with a range of free resources tailored for out-of-work game talent. It includes two still-growing lists — one of job postings and another with contact information for hundreds of people he enlisted to provide support, such as résumé reviews and mock interviews. "I was like, what if I made the most comprehensive job listing site ever?" Satvat told Business Insider of his thinking when he got started on the initiative in late 2022. "I'm good at modeling, scraping the internet." Satvat also created a Discord group for the site's users to network with each other and he's given away thousands of tickets to industry events that he acquired by partnering with their organizers. He said he doesn't charge or make any money off his career site, describing it as a purely philanthropic side hustle. Based on user feedback, Satvat said his efforts to date appear to have helped around 3,900 ousted game-industry workers find new jobs, a feat that earned him the inaugural Game Changer award at last year's annual Game Awards show in Los Angeles and this year's Giving Award from the nonprofit Games for Change in New York. Those honors come as the game industry has been grappling with an exceptionally high volume of layoffs. An estimated 37,600 jobs have been shed since 2022, according to an online tally of termination announcements and media reports compiled by Farhan Noor, a technical artist in California. Like employers in many other industries, game companies overhired during the pandemic but other factors have contributed to the cuts, too, such as rising production and marketing costs. Breaking into the video-game biz Satvat has been a gamer since he was a kid, and by high school, he knew he wanted to work in the industry despite not having artistic inclinations. "I just liked business stuff," he said. But after earning undergraduate and graduate business degrees, he couldn't find any game jobs near where he lived on the East Coast, and staying close to family was a nonnegotiable. "I come from a very tight knit diaspora of a Persian community," he said. Satvat spent several years in business-development roles outside gaming, most recently in a remote one at Amazon's cloud-computing unit. In 2021, after his first year at Amazon, a colleague introduced him to Ethan Evans, a leader in the company's gaming division. Satvat explained that he was a devoted player of franchises like "World of Warcraft" and "The Legend of Zelda," and the conversation ultimately landed him the kind of job he'd long desired. "It was transparent how much he knew the [game] community and loved it," said Evans, who also didn't start his career in gaming and is now an executive coach. Satvat "wasn't trying to get a promotion. He was trying to move from one thing to another to get closer to something he wanted to do." About a year later, though, Satvat reluctantly resigned from Amazon because the Seattle-based company began mandating in-office attendance, which meant he'd have to relocate. He said he landed his current job, a remote business-development position at Chinese game giant Tencent. The person who previously had it reached out over LinkedIn to say he'd just left the company and that Satvat should apply for the role. Satvat later learned that this person found him through mutual LinkedIn connections and was aware of his career site. Now 43, married, and the father of three boys, Satvat works out of his home in Connecticut and continues to spend about 15 to 20 hours every week updating his career site. He also gets help from about 20 volunteers who are aligned with the project's mission of "empowering gamers at every stage of their career." Satvat told BI that it was his successful mid-life pivot to gaming from enterprise software and earlier, healthcare, that made him confident he could become a de facto career guru. When asked for his best advice for job seekers, including those looking to change industries, he pointed to old-fashioned networking. "Spend all your time meeting people," Satvat said. "Every single job I've gotten has been through a relationship."
Geek Girl Authority
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
playdead Archives
Categories Select Category Games GGA Columns Movies Stuff We Like The Daily Bugle TV & Streaming Get Limbo for free this week in the Mobile Epic Games Store. Play as a young boy who must travel through darkness to save his sister. With the decade coming to an end in a few short weeks, we have time to look back at everything ... Today BAFTA announced the nominees for the British Academy Game Awards that will be held on April 9, 2017 at ...
Express Tribune
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Jason Momoa, Andrew Koji, Noah Centineo, Roman Reigns in talks for new 'Street Fighter' film
Jason Momoa, Andrew Koji, Noah Centineo and Roman Reigns are in early talks to star in the upcoming Street Fighter movie from Legendary Entertainment and Capcom. The project, based on the iconic video game franchise, will be directed by Kitao Sakurai, known for The Eric Andre Show. The cast has not yet been finalised, but these early negotiations suggest a high-profile lineup for the adaptation. Legendary is co-developing and co-producing the film with Capcom, ensuring the involvement of the game's original creators. Street Fighter, first launched in 1987, became a genre-defining series with the release of Street Fighter II in 1991, introducing unique characters and styles to competitive fighting games. Its latest instalment, Street Fighter 6, released in 2023, won best fighting game at the Game Awards. Previous film adaptations include the 1994 Street Fighter starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and 2009's Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. The new adaptation follows a wave of successful video game films including The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Astro Bot director says precisely what the industry needs to hear: "It's OK to make a small game" because "players today have a backlog of games" they can't complete
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Following its Game of the Year win at last year's Game Awards, Astro Bot just took home another award, this time for having a director that's saying exactly what the video game industry needs to hear right now. Yes, I made up the award. Speaking during a Game Developers Conference panel that GamesRadar+ attended, Team Asobi studio head Nicolas Doucet said the goal at the outset of making Astro Bot was to make a game that could be finished in a reasonable amount of time. "From the start, we were in the mindset that it's OK to make a compact game ... it's OK to make a small game," said Doucet. "So for us, it means that we're making something of such scale that we can control it fully. That's from a development standpoint. But not only that. For the players, we all know that players today have a backlog of games and cannot complete their games, so the prospect of a game you can actually complete is a really persuasive argument." Persuasive, indeed. Doucet is so persuasive that I think I'll go ahead and do another Astro Bot run instead of playing Assassin's Creed Shadows. That's not true, but the point is, there are too many Assassin's Creed Shadows-sized games, and I'm at the point where I'm begging for mercy. My backlog can't take another massive RPG - it'll crumble under its own mighty weight. Anyway, yes, please make more small games, people. Even if my personal pleas are falling on unsympathetic ears, remember that Astro Bot is a small game, and it won Game of the Year. You can do it too. Team Asobi's gigantic 2024 proves it's time to free Astro Bot from PlayStation's past.
New York Times
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Raised in a Civil War, He Makes Games to Bring People Together
Within a modern but nondescript building a few hundred feet from Stockholm's pretty Riddarfjarden Bay, a frosted glass wall in Josef Fares's office displays etched characters from It Takes Two, his video game studio's 'Toy Story'-esque cooperative adventure about an adult couple's broken relationship. Near his desk, in a lighted case, sits a pair of Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves. 'I can relate, you know, to someone who's speaking his mind,' Fares said. In an industry where executives have become mired in tech marketing-speak and can be as protected by publicists as Hollywood stars are, Fares stands out. Many gamers know the garrulous designer for his appearance at the glitzy Game Awards in 2017, when he twice dismissed the Oscars with a swear word before raising his middle finger to the camera. The sentiment could come as a shock from a person who began his artistic career as a moviemaker, including an autobiographical coming-of-age film set during the Lebanese civil war that was Sweden's entry for best international feature at the Oscars in 2006. But for the past dozen years, Fares's passion has been video games, especially cooperative experiences that can be played on the couch with a sibling, partner, child or friend. Fares enjoyed games from the moment he played Pong on an Atari 2600 while living in Beirut; he fell in love in 1988 when he experienced Super Mario Bros. in Stockholm. After working with a few students to make a game demo in 2009, Fares got excited. That very night he came up with the concept of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, about siblings working together in a time of crisis. His interest in movies dwindled. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
