Brooks Guthrie

I’ve been seeing a lot of people share their takeaways from GDC this week. I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe what I felt there… and honestly I’m not sure I fully can. GDC 2026 left me with a feeling that’s hard to describe. Not because of anything specific I saw or heard… but more because of what it felt like being in the room. The slightly lighter attendance and the new format created something we don’t usually get at GDC… breathing room. After dozens of meetings, hotel conversations, and late night meetups, there was an energy that kind of started to reveal itself across the week. It wasn’t positive. It wasn’t negative either. If I had to describe it, it was a kind of quiet pessimism disguised as quiet optimism. I had the chance to sit with some of the most seasoned and iconic veterans of the industry and ask a simple question… where is all of this headed? The answer, almost unanimously, was simple. "I don’t know." And strangely, that didn’t feel discouraging. It felt honest. From some of the most grizzled executives to indie developers showing up to their first GDC, there was a shared recognition that we are all navigating the same moment together. This industry has been through turbulence before… financial crises, wars, platform shifts, technology waves. But this felt different. The geopolitical landscape is shifting beneath what is a truly Global industry, and you could feel people pausing to acknowledge that reality. Many didn't pause, but instead went straight into cussing. :) What surprised me most though was the tone. It wasn’t defensive. If anything it felt MORE collaborative. Buyers, builders, publishers, partners… there was a subtle understanding that whatever comes next for Games, we’ll have to work through it together. There was a genuine curiosity and real two way conversations that felt much less transactional. I’ve been to a lot of GDCs over the years, including during the financial crisis and other uncertain moments. I’ve never quite felt an atmosphere like this one. To be clear I loved it. Not panic. Not hype. Just an industry taking a breath… and looking around the room.

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One of the better discussions we've had in a while. During the chat, some people shared their screens to show how they search, ended up finding roles, figured out who the recruiters and hiring managers were, and then getting actual introductions set up in real time on the call with job seekers. It was wild! Good luck to the folks who got helped. Waiting to hear how it turns out.

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Should we believe in an MMO comeback with Riot, Blizzard launching new titles, or is this still a wasteland for capital? I asked the panel if they were calling bullish or bullshit on this re-emerging trend: Colan Neese: "I'm bullshit on just MMOs outside of the existing kind of ecosystem, but very, very, very bullish on the ones that are out there now. They're going to continue to gobble up all the attention because they have their community, their sunk costs, their network effects." Chris Heatherly: "I don't think MMOs have been overdone recently. I think they were overdone a decade ago and now they've been underdone. And so there's room in the market for it." Tony Valcarcel: "I just don't see a universe where someone without an incredible amount of capital and an existing IP comes in and does anything that is going to attract enough people to be interesting." Kohji Nagata: "People just want what they already know. And even if these guys try something new, I think that it's gonna die on the vine." My pushback: how many well-funded, genuinely good attempts have players had to choose from? The cost of building one, then attracting an initial audience, can stop a game before it gets a fair test of demand.

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If you're hiring for any role (tech or otherwise) possibly the best hires you could make would be game developers (engineers, artists, designers, producers, qa etc.) Don't overlook them because games are "too different" from what your company does. It's not about the widget, it's about the quality, the performance, and the attitude game development sears into people. Every game dev I've ever known that's made the jump to another field has been an immediate rockstar on any team they join. Why are game devs so awesome? It's because the environment we came up in and thrived in emphasizes several attributes that every firm desperately needs: �� Solution-Oriented Thinking Game developers are constantly seeking solutions. Technical solutions, creative solutions, process solutions. And we're accustomed to working in the gray space of undefined requirements and expectations. 🚤 Bias to Fast Action We don't sit around waiting to be told what to do. We see problems and we move to address them rather than waiting around. ❓ Creative Problem Solving No game project faces the same challenges of the previous one. We're often trying to achieve ambitious goals without enough time or resources to get it 100% right. This has trained us to think around problems, come up with unorthodox solutions. 🧑‍🦰 Relentlessly User-Oriented No one cares more about the end-user experience than game devs. Everything we do is for creating a better time for the person who has to use the software at the end of the day. ⚽ Team-Players No game is built or designed by just one person. Game dev is intensely collaborative in every discipline and at every level. Very few solo heroes here. 🎓 Continuous Learners The tech and best practices of game dev is always rapidly changing. What we learned to complete this project, will be partially out of date on the next so we have to learn new tools, tech, process every single time. Game dev attracts people who LOVE to learn. So next time you see a resume come in for a job from a game dev, give them a chance. At least have a recruiter screen with them and let them show you why game devs are awesome.

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Demystifying the application stack for most roles Let’s make this concrete. A typical games role today can easily get 500 applicants. But those 500 are not competing equally. They fall into three buckets, at least in how I think about it, based on many, many conversations with folks in hiring or recruiting capacities. This is all based on a hypothetical role with 500 applicants and ballpark guesses at figures. The specifics are less important than directional accuracy here. Bottom 400 (80%) Cold applicants with low or unclear fit. Wrong level. Wrong function. Missing domain or tools. No shipped proof. Resume not instantly legible. No connections. No strong differentiators. Next 80 (16%) Qualified but not perfect fit. Strong people, just not the most obvious match at a glance. Some intangibles or networking. Top 20 (4%) High fit. Same level, same domain, same tools, shipped proof, or extremely strong adjacent proof. Strong intangibles and/or networking. Now here’s the reality: From 500 applicants, maybe 8-12 get interviews. One person gets hired. That means the stack is not a “500 person competition.” It’s a three-layer funnel. Bottom 400 Most of the time, functionally zero hires come from here. Not because people aren’t good, but because hiring teams filter for easiest alignment. Next 80 If 8-12 interviews happen, maybe 2-4 come from this bucket. That is roughly 3-5% interview odds per application. Top 20 If 8-12 interviews happen, we can imagine as much as 6-10 come from this bucket. That is roughly 30%-50% interview odds per application. And your hire odds can look like 1 out of ~20, or roughly 5% per application. So yes, as I have always said, I would rather see you do 5 top fit applications than 500 cold low fit applications. And even if you cannot be top fit, because that isn't easy, I would rather see you do 20 mid fit applications where you are genuinely in the top 20% of candidates than 500 cold applications where you are not truly competitive. Because 5 applications at 5% each or 20 applications at 1-2% each beats 500 applications at 0% each. Here’s the other thing I want to say gently. When someone tells me, “I applied to hundreds of jobs,” this is an immediate concern signal for me as a friend who cares about them. When I hear someone say they’re applying in bulk, even talking like that signals to me the approach could use refinement, not more volume. Improving fit, clarity, targeting, the resume and portfolio match, warm intros and relationships, and proof of work. And in ASGC, I see a strong inverse relationship between total applications and time to placement. The fastest placement candidates spend 90%+ of their effort on everything around applying, and 10% or less on submitting. Often that means finding off-the-path games roles or strong adjacent non-games roles. This is super important. The goal is not to be present in stacks. The goal is to apply competitively. A non-competitive application is a mirage.

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