Geoff Keighly’s The Game Awards Honored Amir Satvat As A Folk Hero For Laid Off Devs – In Reality He’s A Tencent Exec Who Runs A Glorified Unemployment List
In a move that feels just as slimy as it does disingenuous, the recent 2024 entry of The Game Awards honored one Amir Satvat as an unsung folk hero who has stepped up and dedicated his time to helping the many, many developers that have lost their jobs across the past few years despite the fact that not only is he a director at Tencent, but his efforts have also amounted to little more than creating a spreadsheet database of those affected devs who are currently looking for work.
If one were unfortunate enough to have slogged through the entirety of Geoff Keighly’s 2024 entry of his annual The Game Awards, they may have caught that awarding of the event’s first-ever TGA Game Changer award to the aforementioned Savat.
“The sad reality is, over the past few years, the gaming industry has suffered significant and unprecedented industry-wide layoffs,” Keighly opened the segment. “Those affected the games we get to play and, even more importantly, the people who make the games we love.”
“We can debate and certainly disagree with the reasons why, and honestly, as a show, we kind of struggle with how to address these topics in as constructive way,” he continued, “but this year, inside of these challenges we found greatness. I’m proud to share with you the story of a single individual who saw developers in need and did something truly extraordinary.”
From there, the ceremony cut to a pre-recorded video highlighting Savat’s work on his self-titled Amir Satvat’s Games Community project (and if the fact that his full name is a part of the ‘community name’ raises a flag, well, buckle up).
Following a brief ‘interview’ with a number of supposedly unemployed game devs (the individuals who appear in the video are identified by first name only, with no specific mention being made of what studios or projects they had previously worked on), the video cuts to the man himself as he recalls the steps he took in creating his resource community.
“In early 2023, significant waves of layoffs started in the games industry,” Savat says in his promo video. “I started a community with one resource. We just started putting together a list of all the job openings out there and over iteration after iteration, it ended up becoming a suite of several different resources. We have 2300 coaching volunteers who’ve given people over 50,000 community coaching conversations for free. I’m proud to say we’ve helped place nearly 3,000 people in jobs.”
Subsequently taking to the stage to accept the award, Satvat beamed to the TGA audience, “I can’t help but say that I love video games with all my heart.”
“To all game makers everywhere, you are seen, and treasured, and our community will always be there to help you,” he continued in his acceptance speech. “Over the last three years, we’ve lost more than 34,000 jobs – a staggering amount of games experience eliminated. This has consequences. You can’t make great games without great people.”
Drawing his thoughts to a close, Satvat ultimately rallied, “As we gather here tonight for this amazing celebration, I challenge everyone to ask themselves what more can we each do to make our industry better.”
However, putting aside all the glitz and glamor of the ceremony and despite the flowering praise heaped upon him, a closer look at both Satvat’s own work history and the exact nature of his “community” suggest that the inaugural TGA Game Changer is far from the ‘savior of the laid-off’ that Keighly made him out to be.
In terms of the first line item, a cursory glance at Satvat’s LinkedIn page reveals that rather than being ‘yet another ground level dev’, he has had a notable history at the upper levels of the industry, having served as a Principal Publisher Producer and Business Development Lead for Amazon Games from 2020-2023 before jumping ship to Tencent, where he currently serves as its Business Development Director.
It should be noted that in his previous role as Amazon Games’ Business Development Lead, one of his duties included searching out new opportunities for “Platform, International, and Mobile content acquisition”, while his current role at Tencent tasks him with “sourcing games investment opportunities”.
In other words, it appears that Satvat is at least directly responsible for at least some of the layoffs he claims to lament, as many of the studios who have had to make cuts (with the main reasons for them being, position redundancy, shifts in development focus, and general cost-cutting) were put in that position due to after having been bought out by Tencent, such as Exoborne team Sharkmob and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed devs Sumo Digital.
And in really kicking devs while they’re down, one would be remiss to not mention the fact that the ‘resource community’ cited as the reason for Satvat’s honoring at the TGAs is nothing more than a glorified ‘video game industry unemployment’ database.
Officially named ‘Amir Satvat’s Games Community‘ and accessible solely through his own personal amirsatvat.com domain (and whose listed social media accounts are all Satvat’s personal ones), said community began with the eponymous Tencent director’s founding of an open-source Google Spreadsheet, currently titled ‘The One Job Seeker’s Workbook’, which lists a number of devs who are currently unemployed and are actively hunting for new work.
However, rather than the included data being compiled and assembled by Satvat himself, either through direct communication with affected devs or even an automated ‘scraping’ of LinkedIn postings or company registry updates, the spreadsheet is instead expected to be populated by the devs themselves via personal submission.
Further, despite claiming to provide an abundance of resources to help connect devs with new employers, Amir Satvat’s Game Community does not boast any direct recruitment pipelines, work-placement partnerships, or even direct lines to any specific hiring director.
Rather, it simply hosts links to a smattering of ‘support content’, all of which essentially amounts to nothing more than links to various studios’ public ‘career info‘ pages, written interview prep guides, and the professional profiles of various individuals who have made themselves available for various portfolio reviews (though notably, no specific system to getting such a review exists, with Satvat’s page instead telling those seeking assistance to just “write anybody on this list” and hope for the best).
(Admittedly, the Community does host a specific spreadsheet which lists currently available industry job openings. However, this list is also assembled without direct research from Satvat and must, like the above ‘unemployment spreadsheet’, be manually filled in by recruiters.)
At the end of the day, it’s currently unknown whether Keighly knew the true extent of Satvat’s involvement in the games industry or if the embattled video game awards show host had the wool pulled over his eyes (and to be clear, neither outcome is good, as it either means Keighly willingly attempted to run cape for the corporate side of the industry or he just failed to do the minimum level of due diligence expected of any event organizer).
However, what is known is that for the TGAs to stroll Satvat out as a ‘champion of the unemployed’ when he’s not only part of the problem but also doing very little in the way of actually finding them new jobs is nothing short of a dishonest kick in the teeth to devs and players everywhere.
(Also, fun fact: Despite The Game Awards occurring roughly four days ago, as of this writing, BIC is the only publication to call out the situation surrounding Satvat, with practically every mainstream video game outlet instead using their coverage to offer him further praise.)
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