Eric Blade

TONIGHT AT 6:30 PM join us for an improvised version of PVP Circuit and help us rebuild our local community brick by brick. I still can't believe I get to work in the video game industry. My 6-year-old would laugh, and then cry once she realized what it means to work in the creative technology sector. That's why IMO everyone could use some levity during these unprecedented times. Join us for a fun evening to raise funds for the Trevor Project. Event link >>> https://lnkd.in/g7tBuP6d Frequently Asked Questions: What if I can't attend the event? - If you can't make it, please consider purchasing a ticket to help us raise money for charity or get one on behalf of someone impacted by layoffs. What if I want to join but can't justify the cost? - If you want to join but find the cost prohibitive, DM me and we'll make it happen (see point above). Do I have to pitch at the event? - No, you don't have to pitch if you prefer to observe. It’s a great way to see how it's done. Will there be another event like this? - We plan to host our community again, but I can't specify if this event will be the focus. #gamesindustry #event #comedy <3

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So with the amount of layoffs in games, its created a large bed of variables to look at.. yeah I'm not a scientist but trying my best to sound smart. Recent lunch with some friends out of work in games, had an interesting convo. All 3 of them are artist and they all applied to the same position at a company. They had found out after they applied they all were in competition and luckily they were in friendly spirits about it. Anyways, two of them got interviews. In the initial talks with the recruiter/hiring manager they were given a salary range. Only two of them got that far in conversation. Of those two, the range was different even though they had similar experience. They compared the responses they got and it was really odd how they were different, same person but different attitude in the way they were replying to them. Also in the interviews, the duties and role was slightly different, like the one with the lower pay range was basically being given a heavier responsibility description. Same interviewer too so a bit odd perhaps how the convo changed per person. The 3rd person, they were being notified once a week or so about progress and to don't worry, we'll get in touch soon with more info. Well.. at the end, none of them got the job, or feedback of why. The 3rd person just got ghosted without an update or reply asking for an update. I feel for them, hence giving them a lunch to vent, its stressful as all heck to interview, not wanting to put all your hope into a job that could or could not happen. And then to see that there are differences and inconsistency on the whole process. Some might actually say the 3rd person had it the best since they never got their hopes set too high but at the same time the ego can take a hit on not being asked to talk. Thoughts, anyone currently interviewing/looking for a job have some experiences to share?

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Paradox Interactive announced today that Double Eleven, the developer behind Prison Architect 2, will be stepping away from the project after nine years with the Prison Architect franchise. Good news first, construction on Prison Architect 2 isn't being halted! Co-development studio Kokku, who's been working on the game since 2023 and previously collaborated with Double Eleven, will take the lead in bringing the sequel to completion. The news comes with a hint of complication. While Prison Architect 2 passed certification, negotiations between Paradox and Double Eleven for continued development reached an impasse. Technical hurdles, particularly with memory usage and minimum specifications, emerged during final testing. Paradox, likely wary of past performance issues (think Cities: Skylines 2), emphasizes their commitment to delivering a high-quality sequel that honors the Prison Architect legacy. Kokku, a Brazilian studio with a history of co-development and outsourcing on major titles like Horizon Forbidden West and Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War, is now at the helm to ensure Prison Architect 2's smooth launch. The Prison Architect series, which began in 2015 with the original simulation/management game, is still on track for a 2024 release with Prison Architect 2. While the development team has shifted, fans can rest assured that work on this highly anticipated sequel continues. (source: https://lnkd.in/dWtBvDhN)

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Navigating the complexities of porting to Apple Vision Pro? Unity's guide offers 6 essential tips to streamline the process, from leveraging Unity's AR Foundation to optimizing your app's performance on Vision Pro. Check out the full guide for expert insights and practical advice to ensure your app shines on Apple's latest platform - https://lnkd.in/dCcxYKem. #AR #VR #AppleVisionPro #Unity #realtime3D

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Develop isn't over for most people. But sadly it is for me. Gabriele Sanfilippo and I attended on Tuesday and Wednesday morning to chat shop with people interested in hearing about life at Spliced Inc. and Anchor Point Studios. Develop never disappoints. And as always>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Familiar Faces ✅ Worthwhile conversations ✅ Effervescent energy at the hotel bar ✅ More beards than the year before, and the year before that ✅ People sporting a different hat every day of the event? ✅ Several meaningful introductions made that we'll keep in touch with? ✅ But more than all this - whilst a lot of studios and publishers will measure ROI by looking at the cost of attending the event and seeing the data off the back of it (as important as this is) - let's not undervalue>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The energy we take from it, and bring back with us 🔋 The connections we make that remind us of the industry we love so much 🤝 The subsequent uplift in focus, happiness and positive attitude it brings to all of us 🌞 What a great reminder of the best industry on the planet! 🌍

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I like sharing the good news about the video game industry (because I know many people have been burned by working through it). Although, as a whole, the industry is expected to continue growing year after year. What do you think this means? The concept of diversity becomes the inevitable truth. Growth encompasses variety and innovation, bringing a richer palette of stories and experiences. This transformation is driven by a new wave of creators who are not just making games but also crafting cultural bridges. A fantastic example is the upcoming game 'Rooster', which celebrates Asian heritage in a deeply authentic way. The team behind Rooster has a shared vision of representing this culture through fun and accessible gameplay experiences, which aligns beautifully with broader industry trends toward inclusivity and representation. It seems like they love what they do to boot! If there was a clear path to surviving the video game market while also enriching the social impact of gaming, IMO, it would be to get behind and champion these vital initiatives. #diversity #equity #inclusivity #asianheritage #rooster

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If you are a math teacher about to teach Pythagoras Theorem to your students, read this! Assign Pythagoras Quest games 1 - 3 for homework. These are playable on a Chromebook, and no installation or password is required. Here is the link: https://lnkd.in/gkE7jHyh Students will learn the types of triangles and their properties by sorting them into the correct groups. They will then identify all the right triangles in the game environment, which demonstrates that the student has understood the difference between a right triangle and other types of triangles. Through this part of the quest, students will also learn that a rectangle is made of two right triangles. In the third game, they will learn about the lengths of the sides of the right triangle and identify the hypotenuse as the longest side. This homework assignment serves as an excellent introduction to Pythagoras’s Theorem. By completing it, your students will come to class with a solid understanding of the properties of right triangles, ready to explore more, derive the theorem, and use it to solve word problems. Students are expected to fully interact with the problems and their participation is required at each step. Try it and see! #math #mathteachers #edtech

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I interviewed our Casting Director and this was the clear takeaway... Voice Actors often ask me "how can I break into video games work." I thought this advise was brilliant 👇 - Actors who are also active gamers seem to get cast in games a lot! - However, Casting Directors aren't specifically looking for this - These actors tend to have a great understanding of the material - They instinctively know how a line or an effort should be performed - They have an enthusiasm & passion for the work - They are often easier to direct and are familiar with the language I am by no means suggesting an actor has to be a gamer to be a voice actor in games! But, if this is an area of the industry an actor wants to get into... Consider getting into the industry via this area... Do those last two lines make sense? I was trying to be clever! #VoiceActing #GameAudio #Develop2024

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👶 Game producers = great parents… ? 🎮 Problem-Solving: Working with different partners/audiences with varying comm methods. 💬 Empathy/Sympathy: Seeing the world through other viewpoints. Interpreting signals! 🧘‍♂️ Stress Management: Resilience in the face of constant pivots & uncertainty… Are you a creating clarity or chaos when having to clean 💩? 📅 Organization: Scheduling routines and adjusting when your plan goes south. Have a mitigation? That helps! Game production = solid parenting prep! 🌟👾🍼 #parenting #chaos💩 #empathy

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Games industry DESPERATELY needs to unionize. Since December my LinkedIn feed has been a sea of people looking for work because they've been laid off, due to the "business strategy" of laying people off when you want to look more profitable in Q1 of the next year, or just "trimming the fat"/ "improving efficiency". I won't say my experience was exactly like this necessarily, but I was recently laid off in January, though I haven't marked myself as looking for work due to many reasons, partly being the lack of jobs, all the bots and spam on this website, and the crushing damage to my self-confidence. Either way, NO ONE should be made to feel this way. I've even heard of people getting laid off mid parental leave, or while they're on vacation with limited internet access, THIS IS DESPICABLE. What's worse is in this industry we all experience imposter syndrome, and anytime this happens you can't help but think we're terrible at our jobs, if only you'd worked harder, spent more of your own time improving your skills, you would be essential enough to the company to keep on, but they still could let you go, so it doesn't even matter. CEOs or in general the entire C-suite of people should be held accountable and publicly shamed. If your business strategy is to hire as much talent as possible, realize you can't keep on all that talent, and then lay them off, then you are incompetent, and should not be given a pat on the back for at least giving severance, when you're just following the lowest requirements of the law. The people who you've laid off are people who have built your company and kept the lights on. You can't just use the excuse, "that's just the way the industry is", that's a weak excuse. There are industries that experience frequent lay offs but have a union and support, such as some plants in the auto industry, and the workers have fought hard for years so that they would have those benefits and salary top-ups. Of course that's not always the case and things could be better, but we shouldn't just sigh and be like "it is what it is", and keep trying to work within the system when the system is broken. I'm just mad right now, for myself, but mostly for my friends, and people I don't even know that work in this industry, because I know these devs are hard working people that are constantly learning and trying to improve, and they are now doubting all their skills and feeling like they're not good enough. As for the people who make these mass lay off decisions a regular occurrence, I would like to say something that may even hurt my career and job opportunities, but deserves to be said, and which many devs would like to say or even scream, Fuck you.

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Dave the Diver is getting a Godzilla DLC, and it is free!! This new DLC will see Dave come face-to-face with the might Godzilla himself, though in keeping with the true spirit of Godzilla you won’t be fighting the big lizard so much as helping it overcome one of its adversaries, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, from the 1966 live-action movie of the same name. Players will need to pilot the G-Force submarine to take Ebirah on, and work alongside Godzilla to protect the planet from the mighty crustacean’s threat. You can claim this DLC right now from the below digital console and PC storefronts, and you’ll need to do so before November 23rd, 2024, because it’s only available until then. After that point it will seemingly either become a paid DLC or completely unavailable, so make sure you scoop it up: 💾 PlayStation Store: https://lnkd.in/eHPjPi4C 💾 Steam: https://lnkd.in/eFGy6_Y5 💾 Nintendo Switch eShop: https://lnkd.in/ehr7r3zH

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Amazing list of practical game design principles from Warren Spector, one of our industry's great. Appreciate how he frames some of the magic we feel playing his games. Can't wait to play his next one! Wonderful peek into Warren's design mind. His Deus Ex is stuff of legends. While I'll argue that there are operable definitions of fun (humbly suggest The 4 Keys to Fun ;) I agree wholeheartedly that a team needs more than a single word "make it Fun" to guide the design. In fact that's kind of the whole point. In our extensive player research players favorite games support multiples of their favorite play styles. From a Psychology perspective it's vital for an exceptional game to offer players new playstyles. The exploration of novelty, cause and effect relationships, and especially new kinds of strategy to get to a goal are vital to what human beings (and all mammals) call play. Definitely worth a read! Here's a list of company values for Warren's company Other Side also worth a look https://lnkd.in/gpq-qusR

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Congratulations to my friends and former co-workers at Bethesda Game Studios on their leadership in driving much-needed and long-overdue change in the video game industry. For reference, industry leadership has had decades to address the issues that have led this industry to the place we now find ourselves - many studios shut down, 40,000+ people laid off, a job market that is the worst in industry history - all while we're still seeing annual revenues across the industry continue to climb after a single year (2022) that showed a drop of 2.16% (from $369 billion to 361 billion) before recovering. (link to source in comments) The last major shift in how our industry treats its employees was in 2007, when EA settled the class action lawsuits that resulted from the "EA Spouse" blog post. 17 years is a long time to watch the same thing (layoffs, crunch time, etc.) continue without any effort to provide the people who make games with a reasonable level of respect, job security, and dignity. Industry leaders: now is the time to lead. Get proactive and start giving the developers that make these games the same priority as you give to profits. In the end, we're all just people, and we're all in this together. You don't have to wait for Unions to sweep the industry and force change through contract negotiations. If BGS is willing to bring a union in to help drive change, the other major studios won't be far behind.

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It’s unfortunate that many qualified individuals miss out on opportunities because they aren’t aware of positions suited to their skills. Enterprise companies often struggle to properly articulate their need for creative and interactive skill sets, which are similar to those in the gaming industry. Many times, they don't know how to accurately describe or validate these needs. When trying to build internal capabilities, positions are often mislabeled based on traditional standards, leading to confusion and missed connections. For instance, companies may assume a developer with Blender knowledge can serve as a 3D artist, which is not the case. Or they might label such a position as a designer or another term that a 3D artist wouldn’t typically search for. This mislabeling creates a disconnect between the job listing and the talent pool. Additionally, the recruitment process itself can be flawed. I’ve seen applications rejected based on the personal biases of recruiters who may not have an artistic background. This means many talented individuals never make it to the interview stage, which is disheartening. The issue lies not with the recruiters but with the organization’s inflexibility and outdated processes. Consider a retail company wanting to enter the metaverse or interactive 3D space. How should they proceed? Should they hire internally to manage the initiative, bring in consultants for strategy, or hire an external expert? And how can they ensure this external hire is capable of building a new department or capability if the person hiring them has no experience with that industry? Chicken and egg situation I guess. With so many people in need of work and companies eager to develop strong interactive, digital, and gaming capabilities, some guidance is crucial. Accurate job descriptions, better validation processes, and an adaptable organizational structure are key to bridging this gap. If your company is looking to navigate this complex landscape and needs help finding the right talent or structuring your team, get in touch. Might be able to provide the guidance you need to succeed.

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At Uncapped Games I'm helping to develop my favorite game I've ever worked on professionally by far... and surprisingly it's an RTS. This is surprising because I (unlike nearly the whole team who are RTS powerhouses), have basically no RTS experience at all. Fire up Super Smash Bros and I may have a shot to impress, but RTS has been a huge - and fun - mental shift for me! ...and somehow, I've gotten pretty good! (At our game at least 😅). Very excitingly, we're on the schedule to say more about our game at SGF ( https://lnkd.in/e5uDTwZp ) in June, but now, kicking things off so to speak, we've put out a really cool documentary that explains some of our philosophies, hopes, and goals. If you're an RTS nerd - or just curious to learn more, check it out: https://lnkd.in/eQpxP3WZ

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I play 5 instruments including Chapman Stick. The Neural DSP Archetypes have been real game changers for me. Here's a short vid of me playing Stick thru Archetypes Cory Wong (left hand) and Mateus Asato (right hand) - https://lnkd.in/g8pm7c4X

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Horrible news today, with Bethesda Game Studios having announced that Arkane Studios Austin, タンゴゲームワークス（Tango Gameworks）and Alpha Dog Games | Bethesda are being shut down. Roundhouse Games is being merged into ZeniMax Online Studios, and staff of some of the affected studios will be moved into other studios, where possible. To those affected by these closures and reshuffles, please find a comprehensive list of resources, below: 🥇First, Discipline Games Jobs Resources: Over the past weeks I have created nine Games Jobs Resources to find jobs in a wide range of disciplines: 🎨 Art, Animation, VFX and UI This resource contains around 1,300 jobs worldwide across all links. Link: https://lnkd.in/eu2bjadW ⚙ Engineering and Programming This resource lists just over 1,700 jobs worldwide across all links. Link: https://lnkd.in/etPj22BE 🕹 Quality Assurance This resource lists over 440 QA jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/dkiEy8da 📑 Game Production This resource lists around 400 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/d9qfQ5tg 📢 Marketing & Community This resource lists around 380 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/dc-PVb3h 🎶 Audio and Sound Design This resource lists around 180 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/dU8t6Esq 📠 Studio Support, HR, Recruitment and BizDev This resource lists around 300 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/dMdWv4xN ⚙ IT This resource lists around 100 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/df7d-KkR 🎮 Game Design This resource lists around 600 jobs worldwide. Link: https://lnkd.in/d2kKaw95 🥈 Second, the Ultimate list of Video Games Career Resources: This should be your one-stop shop for all information. My dear friend Amir Satvat maintains these documents, he is a legend for doing this - please check them out: https://amirsatvat.com/ 🥉 Third, If you have worked in publishing, please message me. I am looking for quite a few roles right now! ⬅ 🎖 Finally, do not give up. Ever. No matter how dark things may look right now, I KNOW you will get through this, you have got this! 👊 Remember you are not alone. If you need help, advice, or even an ear to listen, we're here for you. Always! ➡ A request to my community, please can I ask you to repost this post to your colleagues and friends, so that we can get as many into jobs as possible! And please comment if you or your studio are currently hiring - let's help each other! Much love ❤️ #layoffs #gamesindustry #jobsingames #arkaneaustin #roundhousegames #tangogameworks #alphadoggames

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