Summary
- Amir Satvat, TGA’s “Game Changer” award recipient, created a job placement project helping 3,000 people.
- Satvat received hateful messages for working at Tencent, which some blame for industry layoffs.
- The lack of mention of Tencent in Satvat’s award was due to the focus on his accomplishments and not on his employer.
The recipient of The Game Awards 2024 “Game Changer” award, Amir Satvat, is currently finding himself the target of online hate and abuse. This year, The Game Awards introduced a new award to recognize Satvat, who stepped up during this historically difficult time in the games industry and had a significant impact.
In the past few years, layoffs within the games industry have reached unprecedented heights, and the trend seems unrelenting. According to Satvat, 34,000 jobs have been lost in just three years. Many affected people will have seen a Google Sheets document that began being shared on social media a couple of years back, which provided a thorough and regularly updated list of games companies that were hiring, sortable by function and location and providing links directly to job application pages. This project, the brainchild of Amir Satvat, morphed into a full-fledged website where games industry job seekers and posters can find each other, and it has so far resulted in nearly 3,000 people gaining employment.
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Amir Satvat, a game developer with a head for numbers and data who currently serves as Business Development Director at Tencent, has sunk over 2,000 hours into his Games Community project. Unsurprisingly, he was the first recipient of TGA’s “Game Changer” award. “You can’t make great games without great people,” said Satvat during his acceptance speech as he discussed how negatively impactful this seemingly never-ending wave of layoffs has been on game development. However, what should have been a highlight of Satvat’s career has turned sour, as the game dev has been receiving hateful and hurtful messages since that joyful moment at The Game Awards and has even been the subject of hit pieces by some media outlets. “This is the ‘reward’ for two years of service,” Satvat stated in a LinkedIn post discussing the matter.
The Game Awards’ ‘Game Changer’ Recipient Targeted by Online Haters
Satvat revealed that he has been sent “countless hateful messages” on multiple social media accounts, targeting not only him but his family. Much of this vitriol contains anti-Semitic slurs (Satvat isn’t Jewish, but his wife is) or questions his mental faculties. And the reason for all of this hate, according to the award recipient, is the fact that he works at Tencent and it wasn’t mentioned at The Game Awards. People accuse him of being a plant or agent of the company, even though Satvat’s job placement project began well before he joined Tencent. Additionally, he maintains that the lack of mention of his current employer is simply due to that information being irrelevant to the accomplishments that earned him the “Game Changer” award.
Part of the dislike for Tencent stems from the reality that the Chinese tech conglomerate has been a major contributor to the industry layoffs in the past few years. In November, the Tencent subsidiary behind Exoborne, developer Sharkmob, canceled an unannounced title and laid off most of its staff. Just before that, in October, Tequila Works, whose parent company is Tencent, also faced layoffs after the cancelation of an unannounced game. Visions of Mana’s studio, Ouka Studios, was reportedly shut down entirely after the game’s release in August, and the list continues back to the beginning of the layoff wave and beyond.
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