Kurt Margenau

I want to demystify how ASGC tracks games industry job cuts so you understand what goes into the numbers The way we track industry reductions is far more rigorous than most people realize. I occasionally see comments wondering if we only use public announcements, WARN notices, or that we miss contractors, co dev teams, and non traditional roles. I understand why people might assume that, but that is not how our system works. Collecting jobs data is the most resource intensive process in our community because it shapes our support too. Step one is public information. We monitor news reports, company statements, WARN filings, and government notices. That is just the starting point. Step two is direct community reporting at scale. Every year I receive 5-10K+ messages, just related to job cuts, across LinkedIn, Discord, and email from people sharing what happened to them, their teammates, or their organizations. Much of this never appears in the press. It includes contractors, co dev partners, support studios, and indirect roles, not just FTEs at major publishers. Step three is individual signal tracking. I regularly review posts from professionals who are suddenly open to work or referencing team changes. These signals confirm patterns or reveal cuts that were not announced. All of this flows into a large internal tracking system that helps me understand not just how many roles were affected, but who was impacted, where, and when. That context allows our community to reach out and design support that matches reality rather than headlines. Is it perfect? No. I am still working to improve visibility in regions where transparency is lower. But I can say sincerely this process goes far beyond public records and is more comprehensive than any single external source. You may notice that, for a few years, I no longer publicly name organizations when cuts happen unless they request a Games Org support post. That is intentional. My goal is to avoid errors and avoid shaming, because I recognize that not every reduction comes from bad intent. Sometimes funding ends, contracts fall through, or projects conclude despite leaders trying to do right by their teams. Also, my approach is to build bridges and encourage quiet, meaningful accountability. I regularly hear that organizations know ASGC tracks layoff decisions and understand their actions will reach me, even with smaller or less visible cuts. That awareness, even without public callouts, can influence how situations are handled. Most importantly, workers know their experience is not invisible. Individual data is never shared publicly. People trust me with personal information, and I take that seriously. What I share are patterns, totals, and insights that help us mobilize support. So when we talk about industry cuts, please know this is not casual scorekeeping. It is the result of thousands of conversations and careful tracking to make sure every affected games person counts.

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As a freelance rigger, I need to make sure my builds have a lot of flexibility. So I've recently reworked my lid modules to add variable joint counts. By utilizing a curve-based output I can changed the amount of joints used based on the needs of the project. Higher joint counts for fidelity and control, lower counts for simplicity and optimization. Or I can test and iterate to find a happy middle ground. So animators using my rigs on film or game projects can enjoy the same features, such as: - Automated lid follow with eye movement - Main controls to position the lids through translation and sculpt the curvature with rotation/scale  - Secondary controls for finer detail (If there are enough joints to support it) - Manual or automated blinking. Animate controls, or activate the automated meet point between your posed lids for a perfect seal I've been using iterations of this system over my last few projects, both commercials and games. The core elements of this system have been floating around in my head since 2018, so it's been great to finally put it to the test. 

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85% of game studios have ditched degree requirements. So why is everyone still complaining they can’t find the right talent? The truth: Removing the degree was the easy part. The hard part is vetting for the high-level skills and "architectural minds" that actually move the needle. We’ve moved from "Do you have a diploma?" to "Can you actually solve this specific architectural hurdle in a live environment?" The talent is out there, but they aren't looking at your job boards. They’re being headhunted. #SkillGap #Hiring #GameDev #TalentAcquisition #Education #WorkplaceTrends #GameRecruiter

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85% of game studios have dropped degree requirements. So why is it still so hard to find the right talent? 🧐 The truth is, removing a barrier is only half the battle. When you open the floodgates, you get more applicants, but not necessarily more *qualified* candidates. Without a degree as a filter, the burden falls on recruitment to identify "Maker DNA": the innate ability to solve problems and ship products. AI tools are flooding the market with generic resumes, making the search even harder. This is why "Surgical Recruitment" is no longer optional. You need a partner who knows how to spot a closer, with or without the diploma. Is your screening process overwhelmed? Let’s find the signal in the noise. #GameRecruiter #Hiring #GameDevelopment #RecruitmentLife #TechTalent

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When studios close, sourcers should be the first responders. News broke this week that The Outsiders, the studio behind Metal: Hellsinger, is shutting down after parent company changes. For the developers, designers, and artists impacted, it’s a tough moment. For TA leaders, it’s also a moment of truth. Whenever there’s a sudden shock - whether in gaming, tech, finance, aviation, or energy - hundreds of highly skilled people hit the market at once. And here’s the reality: only companies with modern, proactive sourcing pipelines will be positioned to catch them. I learned this the hard way when I built a global sourcing function at Keywords Studios. The sourcers who thrived weren’t the ones chasing reqs after the fact. They were the ones who kept “warm nets” in place; tracking talent communities, nurturing conversations, and knowing where the skill clusters lived before the layoffs. This applies far beyond game dev: 🧑‍💻 Tech startups: when funding dries up, engineers and PMs scatter. Are you already connected to them? 🛬 Aviation: route closures or MRO downsizing create rare windows to hire certified specialists. Do you have them mapped? 💲 Finance: regulation shifts often trigger sudden exits of risk & compliance staff. Is your sourcing team on top of it? In the GCC, the opportunity is even bigger. As global firms set up in the UAE and the broader region, the TA teams who already have sourcing networks in niche domains will massively outperform those who try to start from scratch. So here’s the question I’d love to throw out: 👉 If your company went under today, how would you want other orgs to “rescue” you, and where would you expect them to source you from? #TalentAcquisition #StrategicSourcing #GamingIndustry #GCC #FutureOfWork #TalentSourcing #Recruitment

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This isn't the matrix, it's Steam. Every single AppID since the beginning of time. In total, 25 years worth of PC games coming in at 253,105 unique entries to date. What's even more fascinating is being able to see which were the first ever games available, at the inception point of one of gaming's biggest platforms.

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Quiet wins don’t get enough credit in game development. A risky feature cut that keeps the schedule on track. A producer who clears roadblocks before they escalate. A teammate who rewrites a doc just so it’s clearer for the next person. None of it makes headlines, but it’s the kind of work that holds projects together. Not every contribution is flashy — but the best teams I’ve worked with are full of people who show up, solve problems, and make the whole thing feel smoother than it should. Those quiet wins stack up. And they matter.

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If you’ve ever worked with smoke, fog, fire, or terrain in Houdini, you’ve used VDBs—whether you knew it or not. But VDBs aren't just "better volumes." They changed how we think about space. 🧬 Here is a quick breakdown of what you need to know about the VDB 🧬 Did VDB Came out of the blue? VDB comes from OpenVDB, which originally developed at DreamWorks Animation to handle massive volumetric data efficiently. The key idea behind it is simple 👉 Don’t store empty space. Only look into the parts that actually contains data. That’s why VDB scales so well. 🧊 The VDB Family members The most common VDB type is the SDF (Signed Distance Field): this type main concern is the distance to the nearest surface Positive = outside Negative = inside Zero = surface which make it gold mine for Mesh analysis, collisions, Boolean operations, and fluid surfaces. But there are some other important VDB types: • Fog VDB → and it focus on density value of 0 is empty while 1 is full opaque commonly used with (smoke, clouds, fire) • Velocity VDB → vector fields for motion usuly used for advection (moving smoke with wind), and guiding particles. • Color VDB → stores Cd / RGB values great for Shading, fire temperature (blackbody radiation), and texture projection. • Mask VDB → that is a "Logic" A specialized, lightweight grid (often Boolean or Integer) so the Values: Often just On/Off (1/0) great for controlling where smoothing happens, limiting a simulation to a specific area, or "culling" data to save memory. Think of VDBs as fields, not just shapes. 🎮 VDB in Real-Time: 2026 Story shortly They are Just friends 💔 for now. While it still doesn't render raw files like a path-tracer, But we have Heterogeneous Volumes system to bridge the gap. ⚡ The Modern Way (Sparse Volume Textures - SVT) In UE 5.4/5.5, you can drag and drop the file directly into the Content Browser and it will converted into a SVT and then use a Heterogeneous Volume Actor to render it in the viewport. ☂️ The Classic Way (Flipbooks/Pseudo-3D) For mobile or high-performance games, bake it into 2D textures this is much cheaper on the GPU. ☄️ The Niagara Way Lookup for particles, Niagara system can sample a VDB to know where to spawn particles or how to move (Velocity VDB). But from Cost POV: VDBs/SVTs are memory-hungry. A long animated sequence can easily eat up several gigabytes of VRAM. Rendering It uses Ray Marching, which is expensive. If you have 10 large VDBs on screen, your frame rate will tank. The Verdict Great for cinematics and hero effects; still "too heavy" for generic background smoke in a competitive shooter. "VDB is for the lab; Baked is for the field." 🎯 Final Thought VDB didn’t just improve volumes. It gave us a way to think in space, distance, and influence. What’s your golden tip on VDB #VDB #OpenVDB #Houdini #FX #Proceduralism #TechnicalArtist #PipelineTD #VFX #GameDev #RealtimeFX #Volumes #OpenToWork

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Game art asset factories aren’t enough anymore. Pretty models mean nothing if the shaders won’t compile. True co-development requires technical art literacy. If an external team can’t debug a pipeline, they aren’t helping. They’re generating high-fidelity technical debt. At Artchop!, we build with integration in mind from day one. The real question is whether studios are looking for true integration partners or just capacity. #GDC #CoDev #TechnicalArt

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“If you strip all the genre debate down to what consistently works for indies, survival games keep coming up for a reason. Open-world survival and crafting isn't just popular on Steam right now, it aligns almost perfectly with what small and midsized teams can realistically build and support. Survival games sit in that sweet spot where systems do the heavy lifting. Instead of needing 30 or 40 hours of handcrafted content, they rely on mechanics, progression loops, and player-driven goals.”

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I've seen people talk about the "deprofessionalization" of game dev - that large game companies are becoming unsustainable and that smaller and indie devs are going to rule the market. Not that long ago, people were complaining about the reverse. The problem then was that all the smaller game companies were dying off and game dev was becoming "winner takes all". All the smaller companies were closing and everyone was going to have to go work at large mega corps. The return of smaller game studios can be a good thing, both for work, as well as the games created. more people taking more risks means more innovation and more "weird" games instead of only safe bets. Don't stress, the pendulum is just swinging back the other way.

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Survival in the Games Industry Cooperative Base-Building Survival FPS StarRupture has sold over 500,000 copies on Steam. If you strip all the genre debate down to what consistently works for indies, survival games keep coming up for a reason. Open-world survival and crafting isn’t just popular on Steam right now, it aligns almost perfectly with what small and mid-sized teams can realistically build and support. Survival games sit in that sweet spot where systems do the heavy lifting. Instead of needing 30 or 40 hours of handcrafted content, they rely on mechanics, progression loops, and player-driven goals. Base building, resource gathering, exploration, environmental threats, and long-term upgrades naturally create replayability. You get emergent stories without having to author every moment. That’s a massive scope advantage. The data backs this up. When you look at which indie games actually break through on Steam, survival and survival-crafting titles show up again and again. They punch above their weight in reviews, concurrent players, and long-term engagement. Palworld is the obvious recent example, but it’s part of a longer trend that includes games like Valheim, Subnautica, Terraria, and countless others. What’s important is why players respond to them. Survival games offer meaningful progression without requiring cinematic production values. You’re always working toward something tangible: a safer base, better tools, new biomes, deeper systems. The sense of forward momentum is constant, and players tolerate rough edges if the systems are compelling. That forgiveness is rare in other genres. They also scale well with both solo and multiplayer audiences. Survival games thrive whether someone plays alone for dozens of hours or jumps in with friends for shared goals. That social flexibility gives them a longer tail and makes them easier to market organically. Compare that to oversaturated genres where supply vastly outweighs demand. Survival games, by contrast, still have room for differentiation through theme, setting, mechanics, or tone. The takeaway isn’t everyone should make a survival game. It’s that survival as a genre structurally favors indie teams. It rewards smart system design, procedural content, and long-term progression over brute-force content production. When survival works, it works at scale, and that’s why it continues to be one of the most reliable paths to commercial success on Steam.

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We've been implementing Neural Texture compression in #Assassinscreedmirage. The overall benefit results in better quality textures for less GPU memory usage (links in the first comment). If you followed the topic since our GDC2024 presentation ,this a very practical application of La Forge's mission to bridge the academic world with Ubisoft. #ubisoft #ubisoftlaforge #innovation 👇 "If you've been thinking, like I have, that we're still some way off seeing AI being used in games for more than just upscaling or frame generation, then it's time to think again" (...) "Enter stage left, neural texture compression to cut down on that memory demand. Given the state of the DRAM and SSD market right now, you can bet your last dollar that a whole heap of game developers will be looking closely at what Ubisoft has done to see if it can help out in their games, too"

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