Amir Satvat, the game job champion, estimated recently that about 230,000 people work in the game industry. That sounded low to Kenn White, one of the leaders of the Game Industry Coffee Chat. So White’s crew dug into the numbers on their own and came up with their own defensible estimate of 740,000 to 900,000.

White, a longtime game developer, said in a LinkedIn post that the median number of their estimates (ranging from low end to high end) is 833,000 game industry employees across more than 25,000 companies. That sounds a lot more impressive, but it’s such a wide variation compared to Satvat’s bottoms-up estimate. Satvat raised his estimate to about 350,000, based on his own analysis of White’s information, but the two sides still remain pretty far apart for people directly employed in games.

White said in his post that this estimate this includes developers and publishers working in PC, Console, Mobile, AR/VR, as well as external developers and outsourcers.

It includes functions like art, engineering, production, management, marketing, sales, and other SG&A and Admin functions. It is not meant to include (and we tried to ensure we did not include) headcount and companies whose primary competency is NOT developing or publishing games.

“When we were working on this list (Kenn White, Brandon Hagerman, and others still), we got to collaborate with Amir Satvat in a very open, honest, top-down methodology, and kept asking ourselves:
Why has no one done this work before to figure this out?” said Neil Haldar, a game industry veteran.

Haldar added, “This is meant to be an answer for a snapshot in time. We might go back and re-run the research at some point, but it’s not meant to be a forever-updating body of work that many others will work on ad infinitum.”

He said the group is open to feedback and will continue to work on the accuracy of the estimate and the assumptions. The group has estimates for each country in terms of low and high estimates of the game industry employee population.

Satvat said in a message to GamesBeat that he is supportive of the group’s exercise and they deserve credit for doing their numbers with realistic information to back it up. He acknowledges that the Game Industry Coffee Chat, which is a descendent of a group I used to frequent on Clubhouse, deserves credit for their research. Satvat’s own estimates come from a bottoms-up approach to counting.

“For context, the 230,000 figure I had been using focused specifically on game developers, based on aggregating open role data and estimating headcount for studios without public numbers. That worked reasonably well for regions like North America — for example, my 104,000 U.S. estimate closely matches theirs — but I now realize it likely undercounted large markets like China and India, where data isn’t easily available in English,” Satvat said.

That’s why he upped his estimate to 350,000.

Savat added, “But the really interesting shift comes from reframing the definition — not just counting game developers, but all people working in the games industry. That broader framing is what could push the number to 600,000, 700,000, or even higher.”

And he said, “While still relatively small compared to some industries, it’s much larger than anything I’ve seen cited before — most dev-only global estimates top out around 350,000. So I think this new framing will open up some healthy and important discussion.”

Satvat counted developers tied to publicly visible job pages, live listings, and traceable hiring activity.

“That’s still how I do it. If someone believes the real number is higher – and I am increasingly convinced it is much higher – I always ask: What company, with current open roles, are we missing? I want to know so we can put those jobs in front of real people looking for work,” he said. “That’s the entire reason my estimate exists. At any moment, folks like Mayank Grover and I only ever see about 10,000 to 15,000 open games roles globally.”

He noted the Games Industry Coffee Chat researchers aren’t disputing that data point.

“But here’s where things get fascinating – and why I’ve been so inspired by the GICC community’s work.
They’re tackling the same question from a completely different angle: A top-down model pulling from global census data, labor bureau reports, and academic pipelines. That broader lens could land their estimate at 1 million+ people in or adjacent to the industry,” Satvat said. “I admire and love this exercise.
The rigor, the effort, the transparency – it’s everything data work should be. Allow me, however, also to explain why reconciling that number is hard and why I still have many open questions, intended in a cooperative and inquisitive frame.”

He noted that even if a top-down figure is directionally correct, it needs to pass other sniff tests – and that’s where things start to stretch and we need to answer tough questions. Unemployment math is one way to cross check the data.

“If we believe in 240,000 workers and see 10,000 to 15,000 open jobs, that’s about 20% unemployment. But if there are a million workers, that drops to 5% unemployment — in line with general U.S. labor force averages. That doesn’t reflect the visible suffering and stagnation many in our field feel,” Satvat said.

He noted that he tracks 3,000 game studios that hire with any regularity and don’t have dead websites.

“Let’s say there 5,000 active studios worldwide and that many pass under our net. If there are a million people in games, the average headcount per studio would be 200, which doesn’t match the actual composition of an industry dominated by small and mid-sized teams,” Satvat said. “And it would mean, as opposed to the long-tail of most small and mid-sized teams that I track with less than 10 people, they would have to be 20 times bigger on average.”

Satvat noted that every major aggregator — LinkedIn, Hitmarker, Work With Indies, etc. — surfaces a consistent number of open jobs. If we were dealing with a million-person industry, we’d expect far greater hiring activity across every region and platform, Satvat said.

And if the headcount were that large, Satvat said we would see heavy hiring in emerging markets. Instead, most high-skill, high-compensation roles are still concentrated in North America, Europe, and select parts of Asia.

If you extrapolate a million workers to about $185 billion in global games revenue, the revenue-per-employee math begins to break — especially when adjusting for roles in lower-cost regions or sectors with lower margins (QA, community, etc.), Satvat said.

Satvat said that both his numbers and GICC’s numbers both matter — because they measure very different things.

“Mine reflects the ‘hiring-visible’ active core of the industry — and is built to support people looking for work today. My original estimate of about 240,000 came from counting only companies with public job pages and listings. But even knowing what I do now, I believe the ratio analysis I used to account for studios I couldn’t see was too conservative,” he said.

With the benefit of hindsight – and after seeing how the GICC team has surfaced global teams, regional directories, and indirect contributors — Satvat said he would up his estimate to 350,000.

That is because he now appreciates the volume of studios and teams that don’t post jobs in the usual places but still employ staff.

“I underestimated adjacent or support functions (QA, tools, operations, localization) that are part of internal teams but don’t always show up in job boards,” he said. “And I didn’t factor in as much of the Asia-Pacific and MENA ecosystems, where hiring is often harder to surface with standard scraping or tracking methods, often because of where roles are listed or language issues.”

That said, Satvat argued that even 350,000 is still a focused count of the structured, salaried, and generally visible part of the global games labor force — not the entire orbit of talent with transferable skills or aspirational ties to games.

Satvat believes GICC explores the broader career and skills ecosystem and represents the scale of where games touch the wider economy.

“I don’t doubt that many of these roles exist – there’s strong top-down data suggesting they do – but I still struggle to see how or where to map them from a bottom-up perspective. That’s what makes it feel so murky to me,” Satvat. “In short, this is a very hard number to pin down – and even if we do, it’s equally hard to ringfence it with a consistent definition.”

Still, Satvat said, “If you ask me which figure I’ll point people to going forward, I’ll reference the GICC work. I strongly encourage everyone to review their estimate and the methodology behind it – it’s thoughtful, transparent, and offers a critical top-down view of the industry’s broader footprint.”

He added, “That said, for my own modeling – especially when tying estimates to the 10,000–15,000 open roles we see at any given moment – I’ll continue to use a more conservative 350,000 estimate. That reflects what I consider the hiring-visible, active core of the video games industry that I can reconcile at an individual company and role level.”

Satvat said he could be convinced to increase his estimate if someone shows him studios with live job openings that aren’t yet in the games jobs workbook. That’s how he will reconcile the gap between the bottom-up and top-down – one real opportunity at a time.

He said whatever the number winds up being, his goal is to put more real jobs in front of real people, understand where the gaps are, and help every developer, artist, and dreamer find their way. He thanked GICC for their efforts.

For my own part, I think the game engine makers have more data that is worth cross checking and I would love to see them weigh in. Unity, Epic Games’ Unreal and even Godot could help us understand how many engines are out there being used on a regular basis, and where they are. I would encourage them to join this conversation. I have brought it up with them in the past.

As an aside, Satvat looked into how many people work at external development and co-development studios (such as Keywords, which says it has 13,000 people, and Virtuos, which has 4,000). But this is also a tough number to assess.

“If I use the total headcount and open roles from that group and look at what percentage is external development, I estimate it falls in the 27% to 35% range,” Satvat said. “Within this, as I discussed with Kenn, contractors are very hard to estimate, so that could be a confounding factor.”

His guess is it’s about a third but he will look into it further.