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https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-deprofessionalization-is-bad-for-video-games
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The 'deprofessionalization of video games' was on full display at PAX East
PAX East felt like a warning: explosively successful games by solo devs and small teams are great, but it could lead to a dearth of vital specialists.
Bryant Francis, Senior Editor
May 16, 2025
At a Glance
- The success of Schedule I, R.E.P.O, and Balatro has shown games by small or solo teams can outperform expensive competitors.
- Some say this points to games requiring fewer developers to be successful, leading to "deprofessionalization."
- Small teams deserve success—but "deprofessionalization" risks damaging the industry. This was easy to see at PAX East.
At DICE and GDC this year I heard talk of a trend in game development that sent a chill down my spine: "deprofessionalization." As A16z marketing partner Ryan K. Rigney
defines it, deprofessionalization is a phenomenon driven by the overperformance of older titles (particularly free-to-play live service games), large studios struggling to drive sales, and the outsized success of some solo developers and small teams.
These three forces, he argues, will combine to "drive career professionals from the traditional, professionalized side of the games industry."
"Some of these people will decide to go indie," he continues. "Others will leave gaming altogether. And in between there’s a vast spectrum of irregular working arrangements available."
Is this trend real? It sure felt so at PAX East 2025. It's no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic led to many game companies decamping from expo floors, retreating to either all-online promotion or in-person community meetups structured around intermittent panels. Gone are the days where a chunk of the development team can get one-on-one facetime with players—shifts in supply and demand have simply moved where marketing takes place.
But something else lurked under the surface. Some notable studios like Behaviour Interactive and Funcom had classic booths up on the show floor. Devolver Digital had maybe the tallest booth on display—but it was only using it to showcase three games:
Mycopunk,
Monster Train 2, and
Botsu. The bulk of the remaining space was taken up by small publishers and game studios.
Wandering through these booths, I found a mix of truly excellent and inspiring games. But also found myself bubbling with frustration. Few of the developers on display were working on teams larger than three people. They talked about publishers wanting ever-more-expensive offerings as part of their pitch deck. Short-term contractors seemed to be the best way to plug gaps. Why did it feel like so few proper businesses were fighting to get their games in front of players at PAX?
Speaking with Rigney and other developers, I sensed that "deprofessionalization" isn't just a catchy phrase to describe demand-side economics in game industry hiring. It's a frustrating reality that may undervalue games from big and small teams alike.
Deprofessionalization is built on the back of devaluing labor
Rigney offered some extra nuance on his "deprofessionalization" theory in an email exchange we had before PAX. He predicted that marketing roles at studios would be "the first" on the chopping block, followed by "roles that seem replaceable to management (even if they're not)."
"The winners will be the creative renegades. I'm talking about the people making work that would have never gotten greenlit at one of these bigger publishers in the first place. Some of these creatives will start their own studio, or dabble in side projects...This is the only creative industry on the planet where one person can make $100 million making something by themselves."
That held up in my survey of the games boothing at PAX. The developers of Mycopunk and
Cat Secretary had some of the larger teams on the floor of about 5-6 people. Indie publisher Playism was showing off a number of excellent-looking games like Mind Diver and Break Arts III. Executive producer Shunji Mizutani told me the average team size the company is looking to back is around 1-3 developers (though he said it's not a hard and fast rule).
My favorite game I saw,
We Harvest Shadows is being developed by
The First Tree solo developer David Wehle. Wehle explained that he's hiring a contract coder to help with the dense system design fueling the "farming" part of his "horror farming simulator." The story was the same everywhere I went. Solo devs, two-person teams, and publishers fishing for low-budget indie hits were the talk of the show.
I want to be clear here—no one I spoke with at PAX East should feel "obligated" to give anyone a job. They're small teams making the most of limited resources, and it's the acceleration in game development technology that's made it possible. What feels wrong is how few people seem to benefit from this status quo.
To go back to Rigney for a moment, his key example of a post-deprofessionalization game developer is veteran developer Aaron Rutledge, a former lead designer on League of Legends, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and Apex Legends. After leaving Respawn Entertainment in 2024 he founded a consultancy firm Area Denial, acting as a "gun for hire" for studios.
Rutledge deserves his success, and the life of a traveling creative called on by other studios sounds romantic. But as a foundation for game development, it's a framework that celebrates the few over the many. It narrows which roles are considered "essential" for making great games (often designers or programmers) and treats other positions as somehow less essential. You could see someone like Wehle hiring someone like Rutledge to bring some of that triple-A experience to a small game.
But that feels like the polar ends of who can benefit in the deprofessionalized world—developers with the stability to swing big for big-shot ideas, and programmers or designers with deep career experience that can be called in like a group of noble mercenaries. People in between will be left out.
Who gets left behind in a world mainly filled with small teams?
My PAX trip validated my fear that three professions are especially vulnerable in this deprofessionalized world: artists, writers, and those working in game audio or music. These roles seemed vulnerable because on these small teams, they were the roles developers mentioned doing in some kind of shared or joint fashion.
All three risk compartmentalization as "asset creators," their work treated as products you can purchase off the store shelf.
Every artist in games knows how hard it is to make a living doing what you love. In-house artist positions have faded away as companies look overseas to produce as many assets as humanly possible at the lowest living wage.
Enthusiasm for AI-generated assets (
that look like dogshit) are nudging this trend along. In the "gun for hire" mindset, working artists aren't worth anything to game development because they're producing goods to be used, not participants in the process. Art directors are in a slightly more stable position, but only by virtue of knowing "what looks good" and telling someone else what they want to do.
As someone who recently shipped his second game as a writer, the cuts to game narrative teams hit close to home. The GDC 2025 State of the Industry survey
reported that of the 11 percent of developers laid off in the last year, 19 percent of them worked in game narrative, the highest of any responding demographic. Two diverging trends are hurting this field: the growth of successful games that don't feature much narrative (either focusing on deep game mechanics or story-lite multiplayer) and the spread of story-driven games authored by the creative director and maybe one or two collaborators create conditions that lower the number of available jobs.
Game writers have long described frustration with how they're treated by the industry, often brought in later in the process and sometimes treated as if they lie in opposition to the rest of the development team. Some studios leaned on the job title of "narrative designer" for professionals who write and implement narrative events, but that still speaks to a mistrust of the profession, that producing words isn't enough to bring value to a team.
Finally, game audio and music professionals both produce work that can be bundled into licensable libraries, with implementation left to designers on a team. Sometimes this work is essential, the number of sounds a game needs can't be produced by an individual human. And composers don't always want to be tied to one studio—working with multiple teams frees them to explore creative projects and keep working when they aren't necessarily needed in a day-to-day game development environment.
But again, treating them this way puts them on the rim of the game development wheel, implying their labor could be deprioritized by true talent that deserves to reap the benefits of game design.
A decentralized creative community needs to benefit creatives
Rigney explained to me that the game industry has one ace up its sleeve that other creative fields don't: its "indie" market is a commercially viable market. "People are paying for these games!," he exclaimed. "This is not happening for indie filmmakers. This isn't happening for books. What's happening for indie games and small studios won't replace the jobs lost at the major publishers, but it will create opportunity for the most creative and most determined people."
But don't rush off to start your indie dreams—it's still as true as it was for years that most indie games do not succeed. And those that don't succeed can still be financial fodder for the shovel merchants of the worlds—your technology companies, your payment processors, your game platforms, your investors, etc. Plenty of companies are standing ready to profit on the devs gunning to be the next Schedule I.
Is there a way deprofessionalization can benefit the developers left behind? Rigney raised one fair point: part of the reason some indies are running circles around large companies is that those companies can mismanage creatives so badly they go for years without shipping a game. If someone smart could crack that problem—improve management at large organizations and make sure games make it out the door—that could be a way to balance the trend.
"Right now none of the solutions are well equipped to solve all the problems. I work in venture capital, which isn't great for funding individual games, but can work well when funding teams that are pursuing large scale growth via some new distribution or technological edge."
Indeed, PAX East showed that we need creative solutions. One shouldn't need to be a social media wunderkind, years of hard-to-earn triple-A experience, or be a jack-of-all-trades to have a career in game development. That path does bring us some wildly inventive games—but leaves us with a community of developers hustling on gig work to keep their dream alive.