Game studio in Japan struggles to find employees as the industry grows stronger 

Masahiko Nakamura, the representative of a Japanese game studio called Indie-us Games has recently revealed via Twitter that the company has lost all their prospective employees to other companies in this year’s hiring season. Thankfully, this story ended on a positive note for the company thanks to word spreading on social media, but the circumstances also tell of interesting recent tendencies in Japan’s game industry. 

Indie-us Games is a company that specializes in Unreal Engine and works on a wide variety of projects from large-scale game production to asset creation and student support. The company is known to have collaborated with Bandai Namco Entertainment on the development of SCARLET NEXUS and to have participated in the development of the anime film Girls und Panzer der Film. They have recently released the cooperative action game TrinityS and are currently developing the super-hero action game UNRESTRICTED. The studio also produces a large number of UE4 assets and generally boasts a top-class track record in Japan as a game studio that uses Unreal Engine. 

Japan has what is often called a job-hunting season, or, from an employer’s perspective, a hiring season, which consists of businesses hiring new graduates in en masse once or twice a year. Students in their third year of studies apply for companies in this period, and those who are successful during a company’s screenings and interviews receive a ”naitei” or tentative job offer, which serves as an unofficial guarantee that the company will employ them upon graduation. This process is competitive for both the jobseekers and the employers, as businesses who want to attract the best candidates must provide better conditions than rival companies. 

As a smaller-scale business, Indie-us Games had been hiring mid-career workers up until this year, but as the scale of their business expanded, they also expanded their scope of hiring, aiming to employ new graduates. Indie-us Games had given early “naitei” to several candidates and offered them a four-month grace period. But as they waited for the candidates’ responses, eventually all of them refused, opting for bigger companies in the industry. 

In recent years, the competition for acquiring human resources among major game companies in Japan has intensified. Each company has implemented wage increases, including increases in starting salaries, and game developers are coming to be regarded more and more as high-level human resources. On the other hand, it is mainly the major companies that have been able to improve conditions in these ways, while small to medium-scale businesses that do not make large enough profits have started struggling in the hiring process. Indie-us Games is a company that anyone familiar with Unreal Engine will recognize and is among the most promising game studios in the industry at the moment. The fact that the company is having a hard time recruiting new talent despite this momentum is quite surprising. 

It’s important to emphasize that Nakamura does not put blame on the students in any way, understanding that candidates opting for big, stable companies is inevitable. He also openly says that the students who received the job offers were all outstanding.  

But thankfully things didn’t end on such a discouraging note for the company. Nakamura reported that, due to the impact of the previously mentioned tweet, the studio has received new job applications in the double-digits, and that they plan to respond to each and every one of them. Though the circumstances were unfortunate, the end result was positive as more people got to know about Indie-us Games and their efforts to recruit new talent. 

The story of Indie-us Games tells of how competitive the hiring process in Japan’s game industry has become, but also of how the value of game creators has risen in recent times. This is a trend that is likely to continue for some time. 

Written by. Amber V based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-07-04 11:13 JST)