Tencent Games

This year’s ASGC CHOC Children's ’s Drive is running at full speed. Thanks to many generous donors, we have already raised $2,800 for sick kids and their families. Please donate here: https://lnkd.in/e-5Z4Rym Today, I want to give a very special thank you to Take-Two Interactive , 2K , and Catharina Lavers Mallet . Cat is the Triforce of Service Leaders in games. Every time I have asked for her help with anything or anyone, she has stepped up. Every time I see her, she is kind to me and everyone around her. And I have seen what a thoughtful, effective executive she is. I have not met a single person who does not like Cat because, honestly, such a person doesn't exist. I wish every leader I met was like Cat. It is hard to fathom such a world. Thanks to Cat’s incredible generosity, and to the generosity of Take-Two and 2K, we are adding 9, sealed, physical, amazing games to the $50 prize tier: PS5 Borderlands 4 PS5 Civilization VII PS5 NBA 2K26 PS5 WWE 2K26 Xbox Series X Borderlands 4 Xbox Series X Civilization VII Xbox Series X Mafia: The Old Country Xbox Series X NBA 2K26 Xbox Series X WWE 2K26 That joins the $50 prize tier already supported by Dark Horse Comics, LLC and Dallas Standly , who are serving as donors for a 2nd year in a row with 8 amazing statues across Halo, Hellboy, The Last of Us, and Fallout. Huge thanks as well to Secretlab , our lead sponsor, for generously donating two officially licensed World of Warcraft chairs. Donate $100 or more and you will be entered into the chair raffle tier, with the winner choosing either the Alliance or Horde chair. Each person can win a maximum of 1 prize. Every dollar supports CHOC Children’s and helps sick kids and their families. We now have nearly $4,000 of prizes in the pool. I know these are tough times, but sick kids and their families never go away. Thank you for finding whatever you can in your heart for this great cause and for our only regular ASGC fundraiser each year, if our community has meant anything to you. Please also join me in thanking Take-Two, 2K, and Cat Lavers-Mallet, whose generosity does credit to her entire organization. I also want to thank Take-Two and its employees for stepping up to help ASGC causes for four years in a row. Many of you have shown up again and again (like my friend Christopher Saunders ). In fact, across ASGC 's nearly 4 years, more than 100 Take-Two employees have donated, coached, helped with jobs, helped with placements, or supported this community in some meaningful way. It is unreal. Someone please take a message to Mr. Zelnick: this is how your organization has earned my deepest respect, again and again and again, beyond game making. You employ damn good people, sir. This is personal: children’s hospitals are the reason my mom is alive today. For the kids. https://lnkd.in/e-5Z4Rym CC: Amy Morhaime + mike knox - I wanted you to know how extraordinary and consistent Cat and Take-Two have been in backing up Gamers for CHOC.

There are very, very few games I still preorder at full price in 2026 that are not made in Kyoto. Even fewer come from studios I trust so much that I do not need to know anything beyond the fact that the game exists and I can buy it. Playground Games ' Forza Horizon is one of them. Why? Well, because they make great shit that is really, really fun. But also... when you look across games history, the list of series with FOUR or more major entries that are still putting up 90+ Metacritic scores is unbelievably small. Of course you have The Battleship... Nintendo: Zelda, Mario And then also... Rockstar: Grand Theft Auto Konami: Metal Gear PlayStation: God of War And yes, Super Smash Bros and Final Fantasy make the cut too, but with a lot more variability. That is the company Forza Horizon now keeps with a 92 for its sixth entry. When a series can land that high this deep into its run, that is how a great franchise becomes a legend. And they haven't had a single clunker: 85, 86, 91, 92, 92, 92. Consider what this run actually means in practice. In 2021, Forza Horizon 5 was the highest rated brand new game of the entire year. In 2026, Forza Horizon 6 is, again, the highest rated brand new game of the entire year. The last time a Forza Horizon game was not number one (the fourth installment) was 2018, when it took Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate all landing in the same twelve months to push it off the top. That is the calibre of game you need to produce just to outscore Forza Horizon. And even then, good luck. If you strip it back to the series where the 90+ run is genuinely consistent and not propped up by a handful of classics surrounded by misses, it collapses even further: Nintendo: Zelda, Mario Rockstar: Grand Theft Auto That's it. Congratulations to this amazing team. You always wonder how a car racing series can keep feeling innovative and fresh enough to smash the ratings, and somehow they do it again, and again, and again. Stop and appreciate how magical this is. We are talking about being in the same paragraph as the three highest rated and most consistent game series of all time. From a car game.

Honestly, lives and careers are long. My most invigorating work came after 38. Simon Pulman was right earlier today in a post: I don’t dismiss the anxiety early-career folks feel for one second. The market is hard, expectations are unreasonable, and people are being asked to hustle, network, and prove themselves in ways past generations were not for more modest outcomes. But you are still at the starting line. You are not even at the starting line. It can be done. Don't think you are done or failed before you even sneeze. That is why I have never liked 30 Under 30 and 40 Under 40 lists. Achievement, and your window for achievement, does not expire. Some people do their most meaningful work later. It is time for 40 Over 40. My man Colonel Sanders didn't start franchising KFC until 65. Keep clucking.

Thank you Wolfjaw Studios team for this great keynote honor and the chance to participate in Wolfjam. It will be so nice to visit SUNY Albany live and to support the vitality of our industry. A personal thanks to Mitchell Patterson who has been a true, vocal, consistent friend to me and to ASGC for a long, long time.

I don’t know how to fully express what notes like this mean to me. ASGC is not only about direct help. Sometimes it is about people knowing they are not alone, that someone is still fighting for them, and that there is still a place for them in games. Huge congratulations to Ezaz Shaikh on landing another role in games and for allowing me to share this with the community. Messages like this are why I keep going. "Zero Profit. Infinite Caring."

There's only one thing I love more than ASGC helping a member find work. And that's when we are able to help the same member more than once! ☺ Eric Drobile , as with all members, 100.000% of this credit goes to YOU for what YOU achieved. But I am delighted that our community was a help. This is the rocket fuel I appreciate each day as we look to help our next member up. What a happy moment! Dear person reading this, we are coming for you next.

If you read nothing else this year, please read this Friends, I had promised a week of surprises and meaningful upgrades to the community. Tonight’s update might not look flashy, but it’s a big deal. We’ve just rolled out the largest upgrade ever to the Games Jobs Workbook in, nearly, 4 years. https://lnkd.in/ePK7nQ44 asgc.gg (Category #2, Resource #5) This is the result of months of focused work and nearly four years of tracking the industry. I pulled together over 14,000 games organizations I’ve ever come across and built a system that now: • Daily scrapes roles across this entire set of companies • Aggressively cleans duplicates, errors, and messy data • Standardizes everything into ~20 categories we’ve used since 2022 • Normalizes roles into on site, hybrid, or remote • Cleans locations down to reliable country, state, and city data • Standardizes employment types and experience levels • Deduplicates even complex cases like multi location listings • Filters to only roles with less than three months of age • With all data populated where factually available On top of that, it’s now community powered: you can submit companies we’ve missed directly for scraping ingestion right on the page, flag issues directly on any row, and everything feeds back into automated cleanup. The system updates daily and largely runs on its own. We have pulled all this new data ourselves. Thanks, however, to Mayank Grover , who for months generously provided raw data and helped with many learnings, and to Gaurav Mathur for gamedevmap (support them: https://lnkd.in/enUe-NKb ). And to this community and the ASGC angels. The result: ~30,000 roles tracked, and ~11,000 active games jobs at any given time. It’s also important context that not all job counts are created equal. With the level of cleaning, deduplication, and recency filtering here, this 11,000 is a true number. On other platforms that allow older roles, duplicates, or less structured data, you could easily think of our figure as 1.5x to 2x that count for effectively the same underlying market, for what others might present. For the first time, I’m confident this reflects the true long tail of active games hiring, in actually being to look at the whole market and also to, fully, scrape out junk and anything without 3 months recency. That means roughly 11,000 games roles and 20,000 roles turn over each year. We had it about right, but it balances out to this number still because we added a bunch in crawling so many more companies and reduced a bunch in being able to smartly clean the data much more. If we assume ~750,000 total jobs in the industry, that’s about 2.7 percent hiring annually. That’s a low churn rate. It confirms a tight market with steady, but limited, movement. This project reflects a massive amount of effort, but also the care and support of many people. I’m proud to finally share it with you. Please enjoy it free forever, just like all at ASGC!

Last week’s #LondonGamesFestival was an excellent experience. What stood out most was how supportive the London games community is. Platforms and experienced publishers were openly sharing practical advice with indie developers — especially on how to achieve meaningful, high-quality exposure without overextending time and resources, and ultimately reach revenue goals. Cassia Curran ’s talk and conversations offered very hands-on insights into Steam publishing, and the overall atmosphere felt genuinely constructive. At #Games4Change , it was also inspiring to see how games can contribute to social good. And it was great seeing Celia Zimmermann again — you could really see her passion during the roundtable. At #Tencent , we’re also working to support better decision-making in games through data. That’s why DataBrain was created. Over the past five years, we’ve had the chance to collaborate and exchange ideas with many game companies across the industry. We’re now hiring summer interns for the DataBrain team in London. If you’re interested in games and curious about AI, feel free to apply through the official link. https://lnkd.in/eiBdSpMj We’re a team that cares about what we build, and we’d love to have you join us — let’s create an AI-for-games summer together. #CareersInTech #InternRecruitment #LondonGameFestival

It’s a huge deal emotionally, as a parent, when you finally take down the child gates for your youngest of three. That moment has come when they can finally handle my looking them in the eyes and explaining that Wind Waker and Twilight Princess aren’t on the Switch 2.