Hitmarker Highlights

Hello there ??

Welcome to another edition of Hitmarker Highlights!?

This week is a mixed bag, with Take-Two layoffs and another major release delay, but some exciting new game announcements to compensate. We've also got insights into which sectors companies are hiring in the most, along with a couple of our standout social posts.

Giddy up! ??

Hot jobs ??

These were the 10 most popular vacancies on our platform over the past week:

You can find another 100+ new opportunities posted since our last newsletter?here. ??

Big news ??

???Grand Theft Auto 6 reportedly targeted for a holiday 2024 release

• According to a GTA Forums insider, Rockstar plans to release the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 by the end of 2024, or early 2025 at the latest. The insider claims that higher-ups at the company are no longer in a position to delay the game for another year or two of development.
• Rockstar is also rumored to be planning to cut "portions of the game" with the intention of releasing them later as DLC content. The decision is being made in order to meet the new deadline, though fans are hopeful not too much will be lost.
• Similar to Activision-Blizzard, the company is now allegedly forcing employees to return to its physical offices after a period of remote working. It has been claimed that if employees refuse to follow the policy, they may be laid off, causing further delays.

Other news ???

This week has been full of ups and downs. Although a new Dragon Ball Z game has been confirmed and Counter-Strike 2 is "just around the corner," Take-Two and Warner Bros. have announced layoffs and a release delay, respectively. ??

???A “Counter-Strike 2” beta could be arriving this month

???Take-Two Interactive lays off employees across its subsidiaries

???A new Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi has been announced

?? ♀??Hogwarts Legacy’s last-gen ports have been delayed until May

Every weekday, we publish 3–4 stories covering all aspects of the gaming industry. The rest of the articles from the past week can be found?here.

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Hiring insights ??

This week we’re looking at the types of vacancies that companies in the gaming industry are hiring for. Using our top 10 hiring sectors data from 2022, it’s possible to see some interesting trends emerging in 2023:

First, nine of our 10 top hiring sectors from 2022 have grown proportionally. This means that there are more of those types of jobs available in 2023 than there were in 2022 when looking across the entire spectrum of vacancies in the video game industry.

So it seems what we could consider as “core” hiring in the industry remains intact, with the likes of game development, game design, QA, and both art specificities from last year’s top 10 all having a larger share of gaming job opportunities than before.?

However, it’s important to note that hiring volume has dropped this year, so there are actually fewer game development, game design, QA, and art jobs than before. This is perhaps unsurprising given all of the layoffs we’ve seen recently.?

To give you a very specific example, between 1st January 2022 and 8th March 2022 Unity posted 235 new vacancies. In the same period of 2023, Unity posted just 115 new vacancies. This is a reduction of over 50%.

This level of contraction isn’t replicated throughout the industry, thankfully, but Unity was our most active hiring company in 2022 with almost 2,000 vacancies posted. If this reduction persists throughout 2023, it will lead to an overall drop of 3% in listings on Hitmarker.

Have a question about hiring trends or other games industry jobs data? Leave a comment below!

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Getting social ??

We're continuing our run of posting as much awesome daily content to our?LinkedIn?and?Twitter?accounts as possible, with content ranging from gaming news to top job offers to hiring insights. ??

Here are two of our best posts from the past week:

Entry-level jobs are some of the most sought-after roles in the industry as more and more young people look to land a job in the industry that made the games they grew up playing.

This week, we noticed a significant increase in the number of entry-level positions posted in just the first week of March, so we knew we had to put together a graphic to share on our?LinkedIn?page.

In particular, EA has posted almost 20 new entry-level roles, some of which are part of its yearly summer internship program. You can check those out?here, or if you’re curious to see what the other companies listed have to offer, you can find all of our entry-level vacancies?here.

It’s difficult to stand out among the sea of fellow job seekers looking to land their dream role in the industry. That’s why this week on?Twitter, we’ve prepared some of our top tips to help improve your visibility on LinkedIn so all eyes are on you when recruiters are searching for the perfect candidate.

The end ??

We hope you enjoyed reading this week's Hitmarker Highlights. We'll be back again next week!?

Best wishes from all of us here in snowy England,

Danny and the gang at Hitmarker ??