What the job market of the gaming industry looks like in the CIS — interview with Tanya Loktionova

About the main problems and challenges in the labor market of the domestic game dev App2Top.ru I talked with the founder of the recruiting company Values Value Tanya Loktionova.

General situation

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru : You have been keeping your finger on the pulse of the gaming industry vacancy market in the CIS for more than a year — since the launch of Values Value. How do you see him today?

Tanya Loktionova

Tanya Loktionova, founder of Values Value: Indeed, I am in a very dense information flow, which can be conditionally divided into three components.

The first part is the vacancies that come to our company. More than half of them are not published anywhere, so we see the real needs of game dev companies. For example, now there is a great demand for middle and top managers among them. Let’s call it the hidden layer of the labor market.

The second part is what appears in specialized game dev sources. For example, for a year and a half we have been making weekly job listings on App2Top, we have our own HR in GameDev group on Facebook, where you can also get an idea of the needs of companies, and we also monitor various groups and communities in social networks.

The third source of information is the study of job search portals that do not specialize in game development. We started publishing quarterly reports based on this analytics in the Values Value blog in the spring of 2018.

Based on all these data, I can say that the CIS game dev labor market is being structured, they are starting to look for employees in narrow specializations.

The division of roles is increasingly observed in marketing, the roles of producers and game designers are more clearly divided, retention and monetization specialists appear, an approach to analytics is being developed and structured.

That is, there are fewer and fewer cases when a producer is required to calculate the balance, and a game designer is required to make a level?

Tanya:Exactly.

You know, in connection with the situation you described, I like to talk about the position, which I call “Vitenka”.

This is a person who started out as a tester, then became a level designer, then a game designer, then a producer and was simultaneously responsible for interacting with localizers.

And this “Vitenka” is promoted or he leaves, the search for a replacement begins. They are not looking for individual specialists to replace them, but exactly the same one person.

Unfortunately, I still stumble upon such vacancies with one hundred percent “Vitenka” inside. But now there is less of this. More and more teams understand who exactly they need.

What other main trend are you observing today?

Tanya: There is a growing demand for managers with experience in game development. A couple of years ago, when there was a crazy hunger in the market, companies were ready to take the tops from other areas. Now, if you need a CFO, they are primarily looking for him with experience in the gaming industry.

There is an increase in expertise, which cannot be blocked by other markets. In addition, the labor market itself is becoming more civilized.

How dynamic is the market as a whole, how much does it change from season to season?

Tanya: It traces the seasonality, which can sometimes be called periods of strange coincidences. These are situations when several companies start looking for specialists of one profile and almost do not look for another.

For example, last fall there was a boom in the search for marketers in a variety of positions, and then there was a slight lull. Then they actively searched for project managers — they tore them off with their hands and feet. For those candidates who are currently applying for PM’s jobs, the market had little to offer for several months in a row.

Now is a good time to look for bizdev. There have not been any high-profile vacancies and exits for a long time, and there is a request from the community for them.

If we return to the question of seasonality, many companies are trying to strengthen the marketing department by the fall. In the summer, they begin preparing their main updates in order to be in time for Halloween — one of the key dates for updates.

These are the requests of companies, but what is the situation on the part of applicants? Is there seasonality there too?

Tanya: Yes. And most often people want to change jobs in September-October. After taking a vacation, they are ready for new challenges. Plus, unlike the period from November to December, they are not deterred by thoughts about an annual bonus, if the company has one, of course.

The second peak, generous to the responses of candidates, is March. Although the principle of deferred demand already works here. However, surprisingly, we get a lot of responses on New Year’s Eve, when people make wishes.

To summarize: a lot is connected with summer and winter vacations, as well as with the spring desire of people for change.

Is there a lull in the summer?

Tanya: Usually, yes, but this year we didn’t see it either in terms of the number of vacancies or responses. Although we assumed that it would be — we even have a small summer vacation, which this time we used for corporate events.

The main problems

The market has a lot of problems. There are fundamental ones connected, let’s say, with the Soviet heritage. How much are these things really “washed out”?

Tanya: I would not call this problem so significant.

We have not lived in the Soviet Union for 27 years, and the average age of an employee in a game dev company is up to 30 years. This means that a huge number of people who work in game development were not born in the USSR. This applies not only to ordinary employees, but also to founders, especially new companies.

The Soviet, if there is, is washed out of the game dev from several sides at once.

Firstly, by people who do not accept this culture. They did not find her — she is not native to them.

Secondly, by changing the business environment, updating the tops.

That is, the historical heritage does not put pressure on us today?

Tanya: I would say that the shortcomings of some owners and founders come not even from Soviet times, but from the 90s. Their “Bratkovsky” and “wild” style of doing business has a greater impact on the industry than the Soviet Union. With all these attitudes: “There are only enemies around”, “Either you or you”.

At the same time, the advantage of our market is openness, openness. Look at how the conferences have grown, how international is the composition of their participants.

Experts come to us from different countries for DevGAMM, Games Gathering, White Nights, and the conferences themselves become international. DevGAMM takes place in Seattle, White Nights — in Prague, and now it will be in Berlin.

This means that the market is an open system, and this implies diffusion and assimilation. And how many people go to work for Western companies? Someone returns, people exchange experiences. The Soviet and 90’s are being washed out faster every year.

I’m glad to hear that, but then what can you call the main problem of owners from the CIS?

Tanya: First of all, this is a low level of professional skills in business and management among the founders and top managers. On excitement, intuition and hard work, it is possible to achieve success, but it is very difficult to repeat it. There is a lack of systematic business education. The business is built either as in the 90s, or as we know how. The success of a product often blinds owners, and they transfer it to the success of management, and these are different things.

The next point is a misunderstanding of who is your main client (both internal and external) and your target audience.

You need to understand that the external client of the gaming company is a player, and some studios continue to make games to realize the creative ego of the producer or to amuse the self—esteem of the founders, or even focus on the feature.

Yes, the funny thing is that many still consider feathering a necessary component of success, and the effectiveness of bizdev is measured by whether he was able to achieve promotion from the site.

Tanya: Fitchering is no longer given to anyone just like that, “for beautiful eyes.” In fact, it has become a discount, a kind of bonus from the platforms for large volumes of purchased traffic. And the feature itself gives only an initial boost, and success determines the quality of the product itself and getting into the target audience.

We got distracted. Let’s get back to the problems of game management.

Tanya: What other problems? Lack of focus. The company made a game in one genre on one platform, received expertise and then, instead of repeating the success and reinvesting, goes to a completely different platform and into a completely different genre.

The market has another serious problem. Companies are focused on hard, not soft skills. Half of the vacancies do not specify the qualities that a person should have, but only the requirements for his professional skills.

Not only in game development, but also in IT, many companies do not know how to determine and communicate what soft skills their employees need, they do not know how to check it at the entrance. And then in the process of work it turns out that “his eyes are not burning.”

The next big problem is salaries and bonuses. A good motivation or compensation system includes material and non-material parts. In financial compensation, such points as a bet, a bonus (for example, for a project or achievement of a milestone) and a personal KPI are very important.

Unfortunately, the industry continues to think in terms of bets. Rarely in any company there are bonuses (not virtual). There is even a joke among the tops in game dev that they are all virtual millionaires. An even bigger problem is the lack of KPIs and job profiles and, as a result, a system for evaluating, training and developing personnel.

Also today it has become much harder for people without experience to get into the industry. Newcomers who suffer from game development have practically no systemic opportunity to join companies that do not solve the issue of attracting “fresh blood” consciously.

As a positive example, we can cite Playrix, which coolly trains level designers, Ubisoft with their internship program for C++ developers and Kharkiv Plarium in general. They understand that if they do not invest in the market now, in training a new generation of specialists, they will have nowhere to hire employees in five years.

You touched on the topic of young cadres. They say it’s hard for them. But is everything so good with those who came to the industry fifteen or twenty years ago, when everyone was making a product for domestic retail?

Tanya: I would conditionally divide veterans into three categories. The first is those who have monetized their experience and are now founders or co—founders of their own companies. They’re doing well.

The second group is those who were able to rebuild and consciously continue their career in the industry. They’re doing well too.

And the third group is “downed pilots”: those who could not come to terms with the realities of the market. They have obvious problems, they don’t want to hire them. Dinosaurs are dying out, no matter how sad it sounds.

Five years ago, it was thought that it was very difficult to find managers who were ready to complete the project. What’s with this problem today?

Tanya: The question is interesting — who is to blame for the fact that the project did not reach the final. Is it a manager?

I’m not sure that only the manager can be both the reason for bringing the project to mind and its failure. This is a multi-component task.

How do I see the role of a project manager in comparison, for example, with a producer?

The producer’s product is a commercially successful project. It may not be made in the best way, it may be a bicycle assembled from crutches, but it must be commercially successful.

The manager’s product is a build made in accordance with the terms of reference, within the agreed time frame, within the approved budget and of proper quality.

One of the main keys to the success of a project manager is the availability of technical specifications and its quality, as well as the degree of changes in the development process. If this risk of changes was not laid down initially and at the same time, for example, the setting changed, the best technology of project implementation was imposed from above, then what questions can there be to the manager? Unless that’s why he didn’t defend his vision and assessment.

You just said “defended your vision.” And how real is it today? Does development in the CIS suffer from authoritarianism?

Tanya: More and more companies are realizing that the voice of the team is important. And even if not everyone has learned to back up this understanding with actions, there are definitely intentions.

There are companies where everything is really decided by the team or producer without the intervention of the tops. And there are companies in which teams protect their internal project, ask for funding and then achieve minimal influence of the owner.

But does the complete detachment of the owner of the company from making decisions on the product always benefit? There are examples, the same Playrix, where the owners of the company influenced what happened in the product, and this helped to achieve repeatable success.

From my experience, I congratulated some company owners on tester’s Day, because the best QA is a top manager or founder who tests a game on an airplane or while waiting for a flight with bad Internet.

You just said that there are examples when the team decides. That is, domestic employees themselves are ready for freedom? Can they do without a “strong hand”?

Tanya: It very much depends on the level of maturity and experience. It is difficult to answer this question unequivocally, it all depends on the people and the company.

The biggest problem, if we talk about the issues that you have just raised (about authoritarianism and independence), is not that they meet/do not meet. The problem may be laid in the hiring process, during which the parties were misled.

The company says that a specialist will have freedom in making decisions, a person goes to work, but there is no freedom. Or when the owner did not interfere for a long time, and then suddenly intervened.

There’s a moment in the Pixar book. One of the biggest fears of the team was that Steve Jobs would start interfering in the work when, years later, he decided to have his office in the studio.

There is nothing wrong with a team or employees making decisions on their own, just as there is nothing wrong with a strong boss who, in accordance with the level of maturity of his company, seeks to control many processes. The main thing is that both sides are satisfied with each other, and freedom or control were not for their own sake, but for the sake of a specific product.

Ours and the West

You mentioned the Pixar experience. This is a Western company. Let’s compare our and Western companies.

Tanya: Here it is necessary to start with a comparison of maturity and the general culture of management. For example, let’s think about how many of our top managers are willing to publicly apologize for fakaps?

If in the West they talk about a problem, then a single statement of an employee, as a rule, is followed by a large-scale reaction of both the company and the community. I’m not idealizing, but there business is brought up by trade unions, and management as a whole understands better what one person’s discontent can result in if it is based on an acute topic for the entire community.

In our country, when an employee openly speaks out, the company’s security service can come and tell him how to live on.

There are such bright agendas in the West as feminism, sabotage. What about them in the domestic gaming industry?

Tanya: Our diversities are not the same as in the West, but much better than in general for other non-domestic industries in the CIS.

I do not know any examples of discrimination based on religion, sexual orientation, political views and the like in game development. But there is a very serious issue of age discrimination, it really exists. People over forty may have great difficulties with finding employment. Although we are very lucky with customers. One of the last extremely successful hires is a 52—year-old programmer.

Let’s admit that such boundaries need to be pushed, because game dev is growing and maturing. The market needs the expertise of a more mature generation, including.

Is there a migration of domestic developers to Western companies now?

Tanya: More and more attention is being paid to our specialists. Not only programmers, but also artists, Data Scientists, producers, game designers, marketers.

This is not about cheap labor, but about experience and not the toughest protection of your work-life balance.

What’s holding you back? To invite expats to work, an appropriate communication environment is needed. For example, the company Nordeus in Serbia, having started inviting foreign employees, completely translated internal communications into English. And the main problem of our specialists and their relocation, alas, is just ignorance of English.

Does the reverse process happen? Do our leading companies hire Western specialists? Given the current earnings of Playrix, Game Insight and many others, they can afford it.

Tanya: I don’t see such a trend yet. But I believe that the moment will come when our growing market will start hiring more and more Eastern European candidates. In fact, people there receive less than our specialists, if we speak in the key of living standards, and sometimes in the key of bare rates.

But now our companies are following the path not so much of transporting foreign specialists here, as of opening foreign offices for certain needs. For example, Zeptolab and Vizor in Barcelona, Mytona in Singapore. You can write a separate article about the Cypriot Russian-speaking community of game developers.

By the way, about the opening of western offices. How do the employees of those studios based in the CIS feel about this? Sometimes it happens like this: the management flies abroad, begins to be listed as a publisher, and the team is already listed as a developer or outsourcer. Don’t they perceive it as something that they were thrown? How does this affect the working atmosphere?

Tanya: In many ways, it depends on how effectively and correctly internal communications are configured in the company. How consciously she approached preparing the team for change.

The reason for moving often lies not in the plane of improving the quality of life of an individual manager, but in the preservation and improvement of business efficiency in the “harsh” realities of the CIS countries.

If there are strong managers and leaders on the ground, if there is a clearly expressed position of the company’s management and well-tuned communications, such changes occur quite organically.

The problems of domestic gaming corporations

We started talking about our top companies. This is a good topic. I keep repeating that today our industry is at the top. The market has not yet seen such a number of successful teams in the West that started in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. And many of them are now turning into colossi. The number of many of them is approaching four, five hundred. Are there any common “rakes” that each of them falls on when scaling in the HR plan?

Tanya: In addition to the lack of a systematic approach to management, not everyone thinks about their employer brand. Today, the brand is very important. With a good swing (here, I have an international study in front of my eyes), it reduces staff turnover by 28%, the cost of hiring by 50% and allows you to take more qualified candidates.

The employer’s brand works not only from what the company tells about itself in open sources, but also from what current and former employees tell about the company, including anonymously.

For all this to work well, the organization needs a clear structure, good management and well-established processes. We need a hiring plan, a forecasting system, when the real needs of the teams are collected, when the roles of each employee in the company are understood.

The biggest problem of fast—growing companies is not hiring, but the inability to “digest” the hired. That is, a situation where there is no system of onboarding, adaptation, plans for a trial period, a system of staff development and training.

I note that now there are many young founders and new companies, including IT companies, who have opened their own division in game development. They already have their own HR and recruiter for teams of 20-40 people. I like this mature approach.

What do you think is the most logical type of organization building for corporations? It is already clear that they are not ready to adopt the Supercell model. But what instead?

Tanya: Okay, let’s talk about the Supercell model. Personally, I don’t like being praised.

Supercell claimed that they have a small development team. At the same time, QA, marketing, localization, creatives, and so on have been outsourced for years.

Or here’s another example.

They say they don’t have HR, but if you look at the profiles of their supposedly non-HR specialists on LinkedIn, it becomes clear that the HR function is being performed in the company, it was just given a different name.

Supercell has built a very cool employer brand. In the center of it is a beautiful idea that the product team should be in the first place, and the administrative staff can not be inflated. But this is a legend.

Big companies can’t get away from having top and middle management to divide into independent studios and/or offices and look for solutions in classical management.

Alas, there is no escape from such tedious things as classical management. Sooner or later, you will have to dive into creating organizational structures, describing the main business processes, strategic sessions, working on the mission, culture and values of the company, building the employer’s brand.

I want to end our conversation with a question about salaries. Today there are at least ten companies in the CIS whose monthly revenues start at $1 million. How much do these teams “overheat” the market with their salaries?

Tanya: In the CIS game development, we do not systematically observe this. There was a period when Wargaming “overheated”, or rather, formed the labor market. They needed a lot of people who needed to be transported to Minsk, and they offered high salaries.

The times when high salaries were only in Wargaming are over. Now Minsk just has high salaries compared to other CIS companies. Plus, by itself, there is such a market that no one overheats anymore.

On the other hand, there are cases when such giants, on the contrary, turn out to be a salary dumping machine in the industry. With the growth of the staff, they are simply forced to pull up their salaries to market ones. Therefore, it may seem that they are “overheating” something there.

Usually, the offer of a high salary is due to the fact that the company urgently needs a specific specialist for a leadership position. In a situation where the team’s downtime will be, say, $60,000 per month, few people will think of the difference in the salary of a creative leader of $2,000 as significant. And he will pay not $4000, but $6000. This is justified and is not “overheating”.

Another problem bothers me. Companies are reluctant to share bonuses, shares and percentages from projects. The compensation system is poorly developed, so our specialists are forced to supplement this variable part with their own rate. If we look at the West and their games, then let’s pay attention to compensation systems, share with the teams not only the hardships of development, but also the joy of financial success.

Tanya will also be at White Nights in Moscow. On October 17, she will read a report on how to retain marketing specialists in the company.