In the talent market of the game circle in 2024, the relationship between supply and demand has not changed much, and the underlying logic is similar to last year, and the impact of the bubble bursting is still there, but the situation of job seekers seems to be more difficult and cruel.
Recently, Grape Jun chatted with a number of game company owners, investors, HR, headhunters, and job seekers, and collected some naked fragments of reality.
01 The appearance of all beings
1. The monthly salary of 20K value planner Xiao A lost his job due to the company's closure, experienced a lot of interviews, refused to do optimization plans for online projects for free, provided the previous project value table and other topics, and finally accepted a one-third reduction in the monthly salary, ready to join the new company, but found that the main value was ready to run away, the future of the project is uncertain, and now he is very hesitant to sign a contract, for fear that he will enter the half-year project disbandment, and change the job of the endless cycle.
2. Xiao B, who used to work in a large factory in Shanghai, recently gave up the public examination and started looking for a job again. A friend's description of him is: the first day: only vote for these positions, the second day: only vote for these companies, the third day: or try other companies, the fourth day: outsourcing can also be face-to-face, the fifth day: why not try to invest in education and training, the sixth day: Beijing and Hangzhou or also try...... At present, Xiao B has only got one interview opportunity, and the next day the opposite person replied: Someone has returned, and the HC is full.
3. Of course, there are lucky examples: a young man who has been working in several large factories and his salary has risen steadily, recently applied for a job and talked about two companies, and was asked to cut his salary by 20%, but in the end Mu Tong offered him a 20% salary increase.
4. An employee of a large factory who was almost laid off, but finally succeeded in reviving the water, said that working in a large factory for a few years is like entering the stratosphere. Even if you are unlucky and the project is cut, as long as the word-of-mouth ability is acceptable, you will have the opportunity to be taken advantage of by your former colleagues. It's just that in the last two years, it's getting harder and harder to get into this stratosphere.
5. A Shanghai headhunter with a performance of nearly one million last year has not made a single transaction so far this year. "There are too many Juniors candidates for resumes in top companies. There are a few senior needs, and they also require fixed-point hunting. Unlike in 2021-2022, I can't wait to fall and pick up an offer on the ground. ”
6. The demand for headhunters is not unfounded: a company found that the environment was not good this year and there were many people looking for jobs, so they found headhunters and said that they wanted to recruit a more capable, harder, and more cost-effective main process, and replace the current main process - even if the latter is not very expensive, it is doing well.
7. Last year, a producer persuaded the boss to set up a two-dimensional project, and several people investigated it for more than half a year, and the conclusion was that as long as the project was not established, it would immediately exceed 90% of domestic producers.
8. A company was looking for a producer, chatted with hundreds of candidates, and finally only made one offer.
9. A nearly 40-year-old former U3D master of a large factory, who used to have a monthly salary of nearly 50K, is now unemployed for three months, with a price of 25K, and still can't find a job.
10. Ji Xinbo, the head of recruitment at Gigabit & Thunder Games, said that the number of resumes he can see in the background has doubled compared to last year, and the number of resumes for school recruitment has also increased by 40%. At the same time, there are more candidates with unemployed experience on their resumes.
02 Supply and demand
1. A company executive said that they still laid off hundreds of people despite significant growth in performance last year, and that the company has few new products this year, and its revenue is about to usher in a wave of decline. What should I do?
2. The bosses have basically reached a consensus: try not to engage in industrialization, build a large team, and do big projects with content. "In the past, a project was 350 million, and if you make a few more, everyone will have the opportunity to get on the table. Now a project is 200 million, and doing 10 is 2 billion, who can afford to lose?"
3. More and more people are discovering that team size is not necessarily proportional to output. One boss's summary is: A team of 500 people is not as strong as the combat effectiveness of 100 people, and it is hard enough to coordinate the work of almost 10 PMs.
4. The big IP project of a large factory was shut down a few years ago. A group planner privately complained that the big problem why the project died was that there were too many people in the team, and there were four producers alone. "If you can cut half of the people, the project will live, and if the rest of the people can cut half of them, it will become a hit. ”
5. The income of a large factory's old projects is high every year, but even the planning positions are almost all outsourced. Internally, it became an excellent case for cost control.
6. Cost control plan for a small and medium-sized company:
7. Senior headhunter Fugui said that stability is an important consideration for the position of module leader (such as checkpoint team leader) of large factories and large projects. Once the candidate is confirmed, there is a high probability that it will not be replaced for 3-5 years. "Unless it's a project change, family factors, or the person's ability is really not good. ”
8. Many HR companies have found that some medium-sized companies will "keep the big but not the small", that is, in order to do the most promising big projects, they will first lay off some marginal projects and ordinary employees, and at the same time recruit key talents who can solve problems for large projects. It's just that the latter process is slow, and the former moves quickly.
9. Some headhunters have concluded that some of the external recruitment needs of large factories are actually pseudo needs used by HR to understand information. If the price of external talents is too ruthless and the recruitment difficulty is too high, it is possible to promote a matter internally - in large factories, there are too many people waiting for the opportunity to rise.
03 Salary
1. For all the positions traded by a headhunting company this year, the candidates' basic salaries have hardly increased, and they are either flat salaries or salary reductions. A rare case of salary increase is from 42K to 44K.
2. It is generally accepted that there should be no companies with extremely high recruitment prices in the market today, and miHoYo, Tencent, and NetEase are no exception. One HR observed that it is quite rare for candidates with less than five years of experience to change jobs by 20%.
3. A headhunter in Shanghai said that in the past, miHoYo employees could double their salaries at every turn, but now many people can also accept equal salaries. If it is an employee of a second-tier manufacturer who wants to enter a large factory, it is not bad not to reduce his salary unless the salary was too low before. "I feel that I can at least increase my price by 20%, and now I have this kind of thought, and it is easy to find a job. ”
4. Shi Tai, the HR director of Papergames, said that companies are still willing to pay millions of annual salaries to compete for professionals who can solve specific business problems. But what remains unchanged is that most of the high-end talents in the industry are still passive job seekers and do not circulate in the talent market.
5. Fugui said that ordinary employees of large factories with an annual salary of more than one million are no longer as sought after by various companies as before. Because compared with a few years ago, everyone's talent density has been qualitatively improved, and HR also understands market information better, "knowing who is managing each project, and also knowing what background each person is, how much it is worth, and whether it is a parallel import." "
6. Even the real big guys sometimes lose out to the cost performance. In one case, the annual package of candidates exceeded 1.5 million, but the budget for the job search position was only 800,000, and in the end, most of them slowly disappeared.
7. Apple, a partner of Zefang Consulting, said that there are still many recruitment needs for some large projects, such as senior programs/main programs with a monthly salary of more than 50K, 3D action combat planning, and so on. In addition, the demand for PM has also ushered in a small explosion, but it is either a big bull with an annual salary of more than 1 million, or a skilled worker with a monthly salary of more than 40K.
8. Non-senior executives who have been working in second- and third-tier companies in the past with a monthly salary of 20K-30K may find it relatively difficult to find a job at present. Apple said that if it is not the top 20% of the team, it may need to consider a salary cut, or be willing to switch from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to Chengdu, Xiamen and other cities.
9. Caution has become a common keyword in recruitment and job hunting this year, and few people change jobs for a salary increase. "In the past, the employees of the big factory were doing well and wanted to go outside to see, but now I am doing well, or don't look at the opportunity - even if the year-end bonus shrinks, it will not be more bitter than the outside, right?"
04 Future
1. Many HR people believe that although the environment is difficult, in fact, most companies have passed the time of mass layoffs. If the new products of each company do well this year, maybe the talent market will have an opportunity to recover.
2. Tencent, NetEase, Eagle Corner, Le Element, Paper, Sanqi and other companies are recognized by everyone as large factories with a large number of recruitment positions. Ji Xinbo said that because some of the projects have entered the mass production stage, Gigabit has set up new content-oriented high-investment projects, and the number of HC to be recruited has increased from 100+ last year to 200+; Shi Tai also said that Paper's "Love and Deep Space" is increasing production capacity, and other projects under research also have a lot of recruitment needs, and the HC to be recruited is close to 400, and the company will pay more attention to school recruitment.
3. In the view of C, the person in charge of recruitment in a large factory, the key to a substantial recovery in the talent market is to produce a keyword similar to eating chicken and two-dimensional, which can drive the market. Otherwise, large manufacturers are willing to make new vertical products into medium-hit models with high reputation, and the expectation of commercial returns does not have to reach billions of dollars a year.
4. In C's view, the salary of the game industry will become more rational. After all, in recent years, it has been difficult for industry profits to grow explosively as in previous years. The steady decline in profits means that there is room for further regulation of labor costs.
5. In the field of R&D, the market for some art experts, including animation, action, special effects, etc., is still very high. C said that this is because the market is now highly hungry for innovative gameplay, but there are too few similar gameplay. Therefore, improving the quality of art is still the direction in which it is easier for products to accumulate competitive advantages.
6. After the normalization of the edition number, the recruitment enthusiasm of overseas distribution began to decrease, and most of the people who were looking for directors or above were recruited, and they could be the person in charge of infrastructure construction from 0 to 1. In addition, many companies are looking for marketing talents from NetEase, because the latter often has many routines and a higher ROI.
7. Mini games may be one of the few areas where demand is still strong, and many companies are looking for new producers. Cocos-related technical positions have also begun to pick up, for example, a large factory in Beijing has offered an annual salary of 1.1 million yuan to Cocos' main process. There was even an HR reply to the candidate: "We want to deepen the cultivation of Cocos, what you have done in recent years is UE, which is not suitable." ”
8. However, for similar positions, candidates are generally required to have H5 or web game experience. At the beginning of the article, Xiao A, the numerical planner, lamented that when he entered the industry three years ago, the candidates who had been recruited and planned and had done H5 were at the bottom of the contempt chain, just like online earning and chess. At that time, whoever the company wanted to persuade to quit would let him do H5, who would have expected that feng shui would take turns now?
9. Apple advises that if you love gaming, it's best to try to stay in the industry. "There are not many good industries now, and the Internet and automobiles are all in a mess. It may only be Web 3.0 that is relatively easy to transform, but everyone should pay attention to avoid being deceived. ”
(In order to protect the privacy of individuals, the details of individual cases have been adjusted.)