Geoff Keighley introduced a new award at The Game Awards 2024. The inaugural “TGA Game Changer” recognizes the labour of particular individuals whose work and contribution to the gaming industry go beyond making games. In short, people that make the industry a better place.
And the gaming industry has not been a good place the last few years, with tens of thousand jobs being destroyed in companies big and small, because gaming isn’t a sustainable as some people thought it would be. Or at least it isn’t for the vast majority of people who makes them.
In that context, the Game Changer award has been given to Amir Satvat, a person who hasn’t worked in the game industry for most of his career. Instead, Satvat is an analyst, having worked on companies like Amazon, although he currently works on gaming giant Tencent since 2023.
But that is not why he was there yesterday. All he has done for the gaming industry has been in his free time, completely selflessly.
Amir Satvat has helped 3,000 people to find jobs in the gaming industry
Amir has been a gamer his whole life, and when he saw more and more people around him working on videogame companies started to loose their jobs, he decided to help them. He put in use all his experience in data collection to create spreadsheets of data for the game industry: basically he helps people find their most suitable job offers easily.
People from all over the world started contacting him on LinkedIn -growing from 4,000 followers to over 100,000-. His lists were updated authomatically with job openings from thousands of game companies, easing the stressful and sometimes overly complicated process of searching for a job.
“People over-engineer things. I noticed there are a lot of sites to help people, but there are maybe 100 sign-ons that you do. Or you have to go to a portal and look at databases. I bet I could just put something like Google Sheets up and make it easy. People will use it. That ended up being true”, Satvat said in a 2023 interview for VentureBeat.
With the help of volunteers, the project became Amir Satvat’s Games Community, which has so far helped over 3,000 people find new jobs. He doesn’t charge anyone anything for it: eveything is completely free. “It’s like a beacon of light”, said Christina, one of the people that have beneffited from Amir’s talent and generosity.
“As we gather here tonight for this amazing celebration, I challenge anyone to ask themselves ‘what more can we each do to make our industry better”, he said in his acceptation speech at The Game Awards, which he described as one of the happiest moment of his life in a LinkedIn post.