Your Dream, Their Layoffs: Building a Resilient Career

This post is for all the anxious students and recent grads trying to break into a games industry in crisis (credit for that phrase goes to Cheryl Platz).

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 Image: Graduates at EGD's 2025 End-of-Year Celebration

First, I stand in solidarity with everyone who has been laid off in the past week (month, year, eternity) from games and tech.

I saw a LinkedIn post earlier that stated, “There’s no roadmap for what a 30-year career in games actually looks like” (credit to Rogelio Olguin). This is true. The average career in games is still only five years long. I’m still here encouraging students to study games (in an affordable, non–debt-accruing way), and there are many reasons why.

Our industry has never been stable, but now we’re talking about it. We’re more connected, and less afraid to speak up. My advice to students has not changed much over the past ten years. Study what you love. Specialize, but don’t put on blinders. Be realistic about the sacrifices.

Study what you love. Choosing your major is not the be-all, end-all for what you will do. Studies show only about 27–40% of graduates work in jobs directly related to their degree a decade later. Your career path is an agglomeration of all your experiences, only part of which will happen while you’re in college. Of course, you can’t be a nurse without going to nursing school, but many jobs don’t require a specific major, especially in an age where you can teach yourself almost anything online.

I know that brings up the argument “Is college worth anything anymore?” The answer is unequivocally yes. But it also means that if you want a career shift later, you might not have to go back to college to do it. There are so many transferable skills from every major that you will find a job if you put in the work; it just might not be your first (or tenth) choice. You can move closer to your dream as your career progresses, and you might find something else you love along the way.

Your first round of college is a period of exploration, growth, and connection-- and good news for those who hate calculus: larger studios, on average, are straying away from hiring only CS majors for roles outside of engineering. There’s value in hiring people who can draw on interdisciplinary learning.

“But Kyra!” you say. “Games is a specialized industry!”

Specialize, but don’t put on blinders. Yes, you should dig deep and get really good at one thing. However, there are roles that combine multiple fields. For example, if you like programming and art, tech art might be the way to go; or if you enjoy programming and narrative, there is such a thing as a technical narrative designer. That role can be what you specialize in.

“But I want to explore! I don’t know yet, and you said college is for exploration!”

This is true, and it’s fine! Just know that you’ll need to put in the work later to build a specialized portfolio. This is not a race, so you can take your time! You can work in other industries while building it. But you cannot skip the step of building up a specialized skill set and developing a portfolio specifically for it to land a job in that area.

There’s a lot of seemingly contradictory messaging out there about exploring vs. grinding vs. needing an internship vs. needing side projects, and it’s no wonder you’re stressed about whether you’re doing the “right” thing, wasting your time, or falling behind. The true answer, at the core, is that you should always be doing. Exploring is doing. Projects are doing. Internships are doing.

What isn’t doing is barely putting any effort into your classes, always talking about ideas for projects and never finishing them, and not pursuing any experiential learning at all. Having a degree opens doors for you, but you still have to walk through the door.

The one caveat is that it will be harder if you don’t land an internship (in anything), because the majority are only available before you graduate. But it’s not impossible. You just might need to get creative about how you build up experience to land your first jobs.

And this leads into what I mean by blinders. Have a dream, but don’t be stubborn and only apply to or accept work in things that are exactly that dream. If you’re applying to internships for character art, keep getting denied, and just keep doing that until graduation, you may end up with no internship at all. And if your portfolio isn’t where it needs to be by graduation, you’ll need to keep working on it. But the longer you’re out of college without finding skilled work, the harder it will be-- and you might need to bring in money for financial reasons.

Wouldn’t it be nicer to work as an administrative assistant for a game or media company, rather than retail at Target? If you had a random internship that required data entry, project management, and organization, you could do that while working on your portfolio and maybe even meet people at the company who could help you get your resume in front of the right person faster. You’ll also be building soft skills that make you a better hire in any position.

This works in reverse too, if you get caught up in layoffs once you’re in the industry. You might get lucky and find work sooner, but the reality is a lot of very talented people are still struggling years later to find new positions in games. Make sure you can transition out of the industry in a way that still makes you feel fulfilled, puts food on the table, and doesn’t hurt your long-term success.

Be realistic about the sacrifices. The games industry isn’t changing overnight. You will need to make sacrifices to pursue the dream, most of them non-negotiable for juniors. Remote work is virtually nonexistent for juniors. If you don’t live in a hub, you will have to move. You might even still need to move even if you do live in a hub. You might even need to move abroad (especially for artists right now).

You need to be comfortable with the idea of moving two to five times in your life for work. You need to be comfortable not making a lot of money at the beginning, and open to short-term contract work. You need to understand the risks of layoffs and be prepared. Crunch hasn’t been eliminated, and will affect your relationships and your quality of life.

It’s totally valid if you don’t want to do any of that, but then you need to find a different day job. That doesn’t make studying games any less valuable, because you can bring that knowledge to other industries (and many will find it valuable), and there are also non-production roles in and around games that aren’t as impacted by these things.

All of this is to say: you should study games if you love it. Regardless of whether you get into a large studio or hit the indie jackpot, you’ll be able to help create a world that is more creative and playful. Maybe you’ll work in movies, theater, or books. Maybe you’ll design toys or playgrounds. Maybe you’ll make better websites or apps. Maybe you’ll design interactive museum exhibits. Maybe you’ll work on VR simulations in Unity for surgeons, or games to help children learn English. Maybe you’ll design theme park rides, or better marketing pop-ups that are less “Instagrammable” and more engaging. Maybe you’ll work for the studio that made your favorite game, and rise to a leadership position that can help create a better industry for all of us. For further reading I suggest Cheryl Platz's other Medium article, Breaking OUT of the Video Game Industry, which has very good examples about how to reframe your work and make connections to other industries.