🎮 The Art of Hiring Poorly in the Games Industry

How Nepotism, Shielded Mediocrity, and Technical Ignorance Sabotage Our Best Teams

“Mediocrity never rises alone. It always brings friends.”
— Anonymous industry veteran

We are living in turbulent times. The games industry—despite historic growth and global expansion—is undergoing one of its deepest structural resets. Thousands of professionals laid off. Studios shuttered. Power consolidated into fewer hands with every acquisition.

But while the headlines focus on layoffs and closures, there’s a quieter, equally destructive force rotting away inside our teams: we still hire badly.

And this isn’t about missing the mark on one or two hires. We’re talking about structurally broken hiring and promotion systems. About processes where real talent is rendered invisible, and mediocrity is reinforced through politics, buddy networks, and fear. Practices where “culture fit” becomes a shield to maintain internal power dynamics. Where brilliant candidates are passed over simply because their presence might unsettle the artificial harmony keeping a fragile organization afloat.

Let’s be clear: talent is not scarce. What’s scarce is the willingness to recognize it, empower it, and protect it. What’s abundant? Cowardly decisions. Visionless managers. Recruiters who don’t understand what the industry even does. And leadership structures built on founding errors that perpetuate themselves from one project to the next because no one wants to admit they got it wrong.

For years, I’ve worked—and talked to others who’ve worked—across all types of studios: indie, AAA, mobile, premium, narrative-focused, live service. And one truth repeats itself: the quality of the product is deeply tied to how the team was built. Not just how much money was spent, not how many people were hired, but who was brought in and why.

The uncomfortable truth is that most studios still don’t know how to design their teams. And that should scare us. Because designing a team is just as critical as designing your progression loop, your monetization model, or your combat system. Build it wrong from the start and you’re setting an expiration date on your project before a single milestone is hit.

The real question isn’t “how do we avoid bad hires?”—it’s “why do we keep tolerating the same predictable hiring failures?” That’s what this article sets out to explore. Not from a management theory perspective, but from the trenches. From what’s really happening behind closed doors. From what many of us think, but few dare to say out loud.

This is not a hit piece. It’s not about calling out individuals. It’s about calling out patterns. Because when those patterns repeat across companies, across countries, across hiring managers and recruiters, we are no longer talking about isolated mistakes—we are talking about systemic symptoms.

Here are six of the most damaging patterns that continue to erode our teams from the inside out:

1. Buddy Silos – When nepotism disguises itself as trust.
2. The Culture Fit Shield – When difference is feared more than failure.
3. Out-of-Touch Recruiters – When HR doesn’t understand the product it’s hiring for.
4. Ignored Portfolios – When silent excellence is filtered out.
5. The Clown Carousel – When incompetence is protected by internal politics.

Each of these will be unpacked not just with examples, but with insights into why they persist and what they cost us. These aren’t abstract errors—they’re culture killers, vision blockers, and ultimately, game-breakers.

And the most critical point: none of this is irreversible. We can fix it. But only if we’re willing to break unspoken pacts, to question sacred cows, and to build cultures that value brilliance even when it threatens the norm.

So welcome to the autopsy of our hiring practices. It won’t be comfortable. But if we want a better future for this industry, we have to look directly at what’s broken.

1. 🧱 Buddy Silos: When Nepotism Wears a Hoodie

One of the most insidious hiring problems in the games industry is also one of the most normalized: the buddy network. Studios don’t always start with formal recruitment pipelines. They start with trust. With “people I’ve worked with before.” With that guy from the game jam. That woman I went to school with. That producer who “helped me ship my last game.”

And look, let’s be honest: there’s nothing inherently wrong with hiring people you know. Familiarity can accelerate onboarding. Trust can ease collaboration. In small indie teams or early-stage startups, pulling from your network is often a necessity.

But here’s where it gets toxic: when the network becomes the only path in. When resumes are skimmed but ignored. When interviews become performative. When entire departments slowly fill with people who all come from the same studios, the same events, the same Slack channels, the same dinners at GDC. What you end up with is not a high-functioning team. You end up with a social silo—and often, a dangerously insulated one.

🎮 I once joined a team where six out of seven leads had all worked at the same now-defunct studio. The team culture? Impossible to crack. They had inside jokes, unwritten rules, and decision-making that happened informally—usually over drinks, without the rest of the team present. When issues came up, they closed ranks. New voices, even senior ones, were routinely dismissed with a shrug. No malice—just tribal autopilot.

In another case, I witnessed a team where every new hire in a particular department over a year had been either a friend, flatmate, or former collaborator of the department head. This wasn’t a mentorship tree. It was a recruitment echo chamber. The team eventually became stagnant, hostile to change, and completely resistant to outside perspectives—even when performance flagged.

Why It Happens

There are structural reasons this keeps happening:

• Speed over process: When hiring happens under crunch conditions, it’s easier to default to “trusted people” than to run a proper search.
• False confidence: Hiring someone you know feels safer, even if you haven’t worked with them in years—or if you’re just friends, not collaborators.
• Fear of cultural clash: Buddy networks self-replicate because they’re afraid an outsider might challenge the status quo. And they’re right—but that’s the point.
• Lack of oversight: Many studios don’t enforce hiring guidelines unless they’re at scale. In smaller orgs, even senior hires are often made without HR involvement or standardized vetting.

The Real Cost

What makes buddy silos especially dangerous is that they often masquerade as stability. Teams appear aligned. Communication seems smooth. But underneath, there’s often groupthink, bias reinforcement, and slow rot.

The damage can look like this:

• Creativity stagnates: Everyone thinks the same way. The same references. The same design solutions. No friction, no growth.
• Newcomers get isolated: If you weren’t part of “the old crew,” good luck getting heard—especially in brainstorming or postmortems.
• Mediocrity gets protected: When things go wrong, accountability disappears. It’s hard to call out someone’s performance when they’re your best friend’s friend.
• Diversity collapses: Not just in demographics, but in thought. People from different creative backgrounds are filtered out before they even step into the room.

One particularly painful example: A highly talented technical designer with MMO experience applied to a mobile studio I was consulting for. His test was excellent, his communication was sharp, and he had real-world experience shipping complex systems under pressure. The hiring manager? Quietly dismissed him because “he didn’t come from one of our trusted networks.” The job ended up going to a former colleague with less than half the experience, who tanked the first milestone. But hey—at least they had drinks history.

How to Fix It

Fixing buddy silos isn’t just about policy. It’s about confronting habits we’ve normalized. Here’s what actually helps:

1. Make the process sacred: Even internal referrals should go through the same test and interview pipeline. No skipping steps.
2. Enforce structured debriefs: Require hiring panels to justify selections with rubrics and examples, not just vibes.
3. Track team composition: If a department is 80% former colleagues of one person, that’s not a coincidence—it’s a red flag.
4. Incentivize outreach: Reward hiring managers who bring in candidates from new geographies, disciplines, and communities.
5. Audit regularly: Do postmortems on failed hires—even friendly ones.

Let’s be real: friend referrals will never disappear. Nor should they. Trust and history matter. But if your team is a clone of your contact list, you’re not building a studio—you’re building a bubble. And bubbles always burst.

2. 🎭 The Culture Fit Shield: When Fear of Discomfort Defeats Talent

Among the most weaponized phrases in modern recruitment is one that sounds deceptively harmless: “They just didn’t feel like a culture fit.”

In theory, assessing cultural alignment is a smart, necessary part of team-building. You want people who can communicate well with each other, share core values, collaborate effectively, and reinforce a healthy dynamic. In reality, though? In the games industry, “culture fit” has become a smokescreen for bias, risk aversion, and subtle gatekeeping.

When someone is too loud, too smart, too direct, or just different—they don’t “fit.” When someone questions broken workflows or proposes better pipelines, they’re “a bit disruptive.” When someone points out imbalances, raises red flags early, or challenges sacred cows, they’re “not very collaborative.” Culture fit, instead of being a shield for harmony, becomes a blunt instrument used to keep new voices out and preserve comfort for those already inside.

💬 I once sat in on a debrief after a strong design candidate’s final interview. They aced the systems test. They spoke clearly and with depth. The feedback? “They seemed like they might challenge a lot of the things we’re doing. Might be a tough personality.” That was it. That was the reason. The candidate, by the way, had shipped three commercially successful titles in the genre the studio was targeting.

Another time, a studio rejected a lead producer applicant because they “seemed too process-driven.” Their last studio had survived multiple game launches under crunch and chaos, and the candidate proposed actual tools to streamline task tracking and cross-department sync. The team—accustomed to a “loose and organic” approach (read: disorganized and leaderless)—felt threatened.

That person went on to lead production for a now-hit AA game. The original studio? Missed its next milestone by four months and hired a “better cultural fit” who turned out to be a yes-person with no roadmap skills.

Culture Fit ≠ Personality Cloning

The danger isn’t in wanting people who align with your team’s vibe. It’s in mistaking comfort for compatibility. Too many studios equate “fit” with “familiar.” A laid-back, joke-heavy, beer-after-work team will view a focused, reserved professional as cold. A team that thrives on chaos may see someone structured and no-nonsense as “too rigid.”

And here’s the kicker: these judgments are often made by mid-level and senior staff who themselves haven’t been evaluated for “fit” in years. They’re protected. They’re insiders. Their red flags don’t trigger alarms because they are the culture.

The result? An industry full of teams that are friendly on the surface, but underperforming underneath. Toxic positivity, unchallenged mediocrity, and allergic reactions to friction become the norm. And ironically, this leads to more misalignment, not less.

When Culture Fit Protects the Wrong People

Even worse, culture fit is often invoked selectively. Teams tolerate problematic behavior if it comes from “someone who gets us.” People who stir conflict, sow drama, or undercut colleagues get protected if they’re well-liked by leadership or have shared a couch at GDC.

🧨 In one studio, a narrative designer routinely pushed others aside in meetings, claimed credit for lines they didn’t write, and derailed sprint reviews with passive-aggressive jabs. When newer team members raised concerns, the response from leadership was: “Yeah, they can be intense, but they’ve been here since the early days. That’s just how they are.”

Meanwhile, someone who points out scope issues too early, or who critiques weak documentation, or who dares to say, “this pitch doesn’t make sense for the audience we’re targeting”—that person gets flagged for poor communication, a lack of “team spirit,” or “not being on the same page.”

This backwards logic creates a soft moat around dysfunction. And once that moat exists, it’s incredibly hard to drain.

What We Should Be Assessing Instead

If culture fit continues to be used as a hiring metric, it needs to be reframed. Here’s what actual alignment should focus on:

• Shared values: Do they care about player experience? Do they value iteration, transparency, and accountability?
• Work ethics: Do they show ownership? Can they handle feedback? Are they resilient and adaptable?
• Collaboration style: Can they navigate ambiguity? Do they know when to lead and when to follow?

Everything else—style, tone, personality, background—should not be barriers. They should be variables. Diversity in energy, communication, and worldview isn’t a bug. It’s the secret to not making the same game over and over again.

Culture Add > Culture Fit

Many modern companies have begun to adopt the concept of Culture Add—the idea that instead of trying to find people who fit your culture, you look for people who expand it. Who bring in new ways of thinking, new experiences, new empathy for different player types and work styles.

Studios serious about doing better can ask:

• What perspectives are we missing?
• Who challenges us in a productive way?
• Who shows us blind spots we didn’t know we had?

It’s not always easy. Yes, there will be friction. But in creative industries, friction is the price of evolution. And evolution is what sustains studios, teams, and products.

3. 🙈 Fire HR: Why the Games Industry Should Be Run by Game Developers — Including Recruiting

Let’s stop sugarcoating it: human resources as a discipline has no business leading hiring in the game industry unless it is staffed by former game developers. This might sound extreme. But after years of watching creative, technical, and production teams wrecked by HR-driven hiring pipelines, there’s no other honest conclusion.

The reality is that most HR departments in games are imported wholesale from corporate playbooks — built on philosophies that work for banks, SaaS startups, or retail chains. Not for creative production cultures. Not for environments that rely on prototyping, friction, and design iteration under unstable conditions. Not for industries where a bad hire doesn’t just cost money — it derails entire verticals.

🧨 A recruiter once passed on a combat designer because “they hadn’t had a manager role yet.” Never mind that they built the entire gameplay core for a successful indie roguelike. In the recruiter’s spreadsheet, there was no “team lead” bullet. Instant discard.

These hiring funnels are run by people with degrees in psychology, communications, or general business. They come from HR internships at banks or consultancies. They know how to run compliance workshops and fill out DEI reports — but ask them what a content pipeline looks like, or what a tech artist does, or how level design scales across mobile vs. console, and you’ll get silence.

The result? A structurally blind layer sitting between talent and the people who actually build games. The damage this does cannot be overstated.

HR Doesn’t Belong in Games — Unless It’s Built By Developers

This is the core thesis: HR in gaming should not be imported. It should be cultivated — from within.

You don’t hire a producer who doesn’t understand how teams function. You don’t hire a lead artist who’s never opened a DCC tool. Why, then, do we continue to hire HR managers who have never worked in a dev team, shipped a milestone, or participated in a feature breakdown?

🎮 One studio I worked with had an HR lead with zero game knowledge running hiring for the design department. She insisted on behavioral interviews only — no design tests. “If they’re creative, they’ll show it in conversation,” she said. We lost six top-tier candidates that quarter. One went on to design encounter systems for a major open-world RPG. We hired a smooth-talker who bombed sprint two.

The truth is brutal but necessary: if you haven’t shipped a game, you can’t assess who’s ready to ship one. And if you don’t understand how creative teams operate — their dependencies, stress points, languages — you shouldn’t be designing hiring funnels for them.

HR by Developers, for Developers

Here’s what needs to happen, full stop:

1. HR departments in game companies must originate from development roles. That means former producers, leads, senior ICs — people who understand the stakes of building a game.
2. No external HR hires without game studio immersion. If you come from another industry, fine. But you must embed in game teams, study pipelines, shadow disciplines, and play the product. No one should hire in this field while being disconnected from the craft.
3. Treat hiring as a creative pipeline. Hiring is not just logistics. It’s narrative design for your team. It’s systems thinking. It’s multiplayer balancing. If you wouldn’t let a stranger tune your economy, don’t let one staff your gameplay team.
4. Abolish resume-first filtering. Paper means nothing. Shipped games, prototypes, self-taught mastery — that’s the true portfolio. Yet corporate HR still filters for keywords and LinkedIn “polish” instead of actual craft impact.

This isn’t just theory. In studios where hiring is owned by production or discipline leads, where the recruiting team includes former developers, and where HR is minimal or embedded — hiring is faster, onboarding smoother, and team cohesion significantly higher.

The Illusion of Neutrality

Corporate HR likes to think of itself as an objective function — a neutral middle layer that “standardizes” decisions. But neutrality without understanding becomes a weapon.

• It protects mediocrity by hiring those who speak the right HR-approved language.
• It filters out disruptors who challenge status quo workflows.
• It favors polished “leaders” over deeply capable builders.

We’ve all seen this play out. A sharp, passionate dev gets blocked by someone who “just doesn’t feel right.” A bland middle-manager gets promoted because “they communicate well with stakeholders.” The pipeline doesn’t reward impact — it rewards presentation.

This is the core failure of HR as it currently exists in games: it’s optimized to protect itself, not the product.

A Studio With No HR Is Better Than One With the Wrong HR

Harsh? Maybe. But consider this:

A flat studio with no formal HR but with empowered, trained leads can build strong teams based on trust, craft, and results.

A studio with a bloated HR layer, imported from tech or consulting, will build defensive, insular hiring systems that reward familiarity and punish creative risk.

So yes — it is better to have no HR at all than to have an HR team that misunderstands the product, mistrusts the developers, and replicates systems from unrelated industries.

If your HR doesn’t ship — fire them. Or retrain them, deeply, from the ground up. Make them shadow QA. Embed them in sprint planning. Have them do onboarding for new tools. Get them into the trenches — or out of the building.

4. 📁 Ignored Portfolios: When Excellence Gets Marked as a Threat

There’s a bitter truth behind many hiring rejections in game development — a truth we rarely say out loud in meetings or debriefs:

The portfolio wasn’t the problem. The candidate was simply too good.

In theory, game studios want excellence. They want innovation. They want “rockstars,” “ninjas,” and “unicorns.” But in practice? When those people apply — when their portfolios land in someone’s inbox — the reality is that many hiring teams panic.

Why? Because excellence shines a light. And not everyone wants to be seen clearly.

💬 I once reviewed a UI artist’s portfolio that was museum-tier. Fluent in UX heuristics. Fluent in Unity UI implementation. They had custom tooling for designers and devs to work together faster. The response from the lead? “We’re not really looking for something that polished. Might be too rigid for our style.”

Translation: They might make me look like I don’t know what I’m doing.

This is a common dynamic, especially in teams with long-standing leads or peers who haven’t had their authority questioned in years. A truly exceptional candidate doesn’t just bring skills — they bring gravity. Their presence shifts conversations. Their insight reveals flaws. And that, for many teams, is deeply uncomfortable.

Gatekeeping From the Inside

The most insidious rejections don’t come from clueless HR. They come from inside the department, by people who should recognize greatness but choose not to.

Sometimes it’s insecurity: a mid-level developer afraid they’ll be shown up.
Sometimes it’s ego: a lead who wants to be the smartest in the room.
Sometimes it’s inertia: “this is how we’ve always done it.”
And sometimes — far too often — it’s pure politics.

🔥 A senior gameplay engineer applied to a mobile studio. Their code samples were pristine. Modular, well-documented, high-performance. But a junior on the team, who’d just been promoted, quietly flagged them as “too hardcore” and “maybe not a fit.” Why? Because the junior had been building their influence — and this new candidate would have exposed their fragility. The lead deferred. The candidate was ghosted.

It happens across disciplines: an amazing concept artist gets rejected for “not matching the house style” when the real reason is that their work is far better than the art director’s. A systems designer with deep live ops experience gets filtered out for “overthinking” mechanics — when really, the team has never worked with someone that strategic before.

In many cases, portfolios are read not to assess quality — but to look for reasons to say no. The more talented the candidate, the more surgically their work is dissected until a flaw can be found, no matter how contrived.

The Excuses We Use

• “We’re looking for something more specific.”
• “They feel a little overqualified.”
• “Not sure they’d enjoy our process.”
• “Doesn’t quite match the vibe.”
• “Portfolio is great, but we’re not sure they’d stay long.”

All of these are camouflage. Soft lies we tell ourselves to avoid the harder truth: we’re not building teams for excellence — we’re building teams for comfort.

How Great Talent Slips Through the Cracks

Talented candidates often do everything right.
They personalize their cover letters.
They curate their portfolio to match the studio’s genre.
They prepare. They’re thoughtful in interviews.
And still — they get passed over.

Why? Because greatness requires vulnerability from the teams hiring them. It requires saying:

“This person is better than me in X. And that’s why we need them.”

But few studios incentivize that kind of courage. Many implicitly reward protectionism — leads who keep the peace, juniors who don’t threaten hierarchy, teams that “gel” rather than level up. So instead of inviting better people into the room, we shrink the room to protect those already inside.

What Needs to Change

1. Invert the insecurity: Celebrate being challenged. Hire the person who intimidates you because they might push your thinking.
2. Peer vetoes must be justified: If a peer rejects a candidate, they should write a formal assessment. “Didn’t vibe” doesn’t cut it.
3. Use anonymous portfolio reviews: Strip names, titles, and CVs. Let the work speak first.
4. Identify anti-talent behavior in your team: If someone consistently shoots down excellent candidates with vague concerns, ask why. Privately, directly, honestly.
5. Benchmark upward, not laterally: Don’t just compare applicants to who you have. Compare them to who you wish you had.

Greatness Is Disruptive — That’s the Point

The best hires are rarely “easy.” They raise questions. They demand alignment. They force better documentation, tighter feedback, more coherent pipelines.

But that discomfort? That’s the sound of a team evolving.

Every time a brilliant portfolio is passed over because it makes someone uncomfortable, a team robs itself of its own potential. And every time a mediocre candidate is chosen because they’re “safe,” the ceiling lowers for everyone.

It’s time to stop hiring for comfort. It’s time to start hiring for consequence.

5. 🎪 The Clown Carousel: How the Mediocre Get Promoted, Protected, and Passed Around

If you’ve spent any time in the games industry, you’ve seen it — that one person. The senior profile nobody really likes, respects, or learns from. The one who doesn’t contribute anything meaningful, adds friction to every sync, fails to own even basic deliverables, and yet somehow… never gets fired.

Even worse — they get promoted. Or moved “laterally” to a new position. Or worse still: they vanish for a month and then reappear at a sister studio across the globe, now with a slightly fancier title and a broader mandate.

🎮 I once worked at a European studio where a so-called “live ops strategist” arrived from a U.S. branch. He had tanked two live games back home. His roadmap was incoherent, his retention ideas outdated, and his meetings a wasteland of buzzwords. But he had “good chemistry with the VP.” After six months of damage, he was moved to the MENA office. Nobody spoke about it. The clown rolled on.

Welcome to the clown carousel — the structural phenomenon where unqualified, unaccountable people bounce endlessly from role to role within the industry, shielded by politics, personal relationships, and cowardly leadership.

What Does a Clown Look Like?

They’re rarely outright hostile. Most are superficially charming, politically aware, and good at upward visibility. They know how to speak the language of “alignment,” “cross-functionality,” and “strategic execution.” They’re also experts at avoiding accountability while claiming credit for team output.

They rarely ship. And when they do, they’re on the periphery. They attend meetings, forward Slack threads, give vague feedback, and keep just enough surface-level involvement to justify their seat. But if you pulled their contribution out of the build — the product wouldn’t change.

And yet… they thrive.

Why? Because mediocrity protects itself. Because once someone enters the middle-to-upper rungs of studio hierarchies, the risk of removing them becomes politically expensive. And because no one wants to admit a structural failure that’s already metastasized.

The Contracts That Shield Incompetence

The clown carousel doesn’t spin on social charm alone. It’s often backed by contractual cowardice.

At many companies, senior roles come with protection clauses. Long notice periods. Stock options. Relocation packages. Severance penalties. So when someone underperforms at that level, leadership doesn’t remove them — they reassign them. Quietly. “Let’s try them in a producer role in Berlin.” “They might be better suited to bizdev.” “We’ll give them one more shot in the regional office.”

These reassignments aren’t about second chances. They’re about avoiding embarrassment. They’re about shielding whoever greenlit the hire in the first place. They’re about burying the failure under geography, org charts, and PR spin.

🧨 A well-connected director was removed from a project after months of dysfunction. The game was missing targets, the team morale was cratering, and leads were privately asking for reassignment. Leadership finally stepped in… and promoted him to “Head of Strategic Development” — a role that didn’t exist before and had no deliverables attached. Two months later, he was listed as the studio’s GDC representative.

You can’t make this up.

Who Enables the Carousel?

• Executive leadership, too conflict-averse to admit internal rot.
• HR, more concerned with avoiding legal friction than protecting team health.
• Other clowns, who form mutual protection networks under the guise of “cross-functional collaboration.”
• Mid-level staff, resigned to the dysfunction, who stay silent because it’s “just how things are.”

The most damning enablers, though, are the studios that care more about optics than outcomes. They celebrate titles, not delivery. They reward visibility, not contribution. They measure performance with engagement surveys, not working builds.

Why It’s Worse in Games

The carousel is not unique to gaming, but gaming supercharges it. Why?

1. Geographic sprawl: Global studios allow easy lateral movement — out of sight, out of accountability.
2. Creative ambiguity: It’s easy to hide failure when your job is “vision,” “alignment,” or “strategic input.”
3. IP inertia: A strong brand can carry a mediocre team across the finish line, masking dysfunction.
4. Leadership turnover: When new execs cycle in every 18 months, nobody owns the full lifecycle of a bad hire.

The result? Clowns drift upward, sideways, and abroad. And teams under them burn out, ship less, or collapse entirely.

What This Does to Real Talent

Nothing demoralizes a team faster than watching a brilliant peer get laid off while a useless exec gets transferred.
Nothing erodes trust like seeing a toxic lead rewarded with a sabbatical while juniors are pushed to crunch.
Nothing breaks morale more than realizing your studio will protect its mistakes before it promotes its performers.

When clowns are allowed to survive and even ascend, the message is clear: the system isn’t broken — it’s designed this way.

What Needs to Happen

• Audit upward: Every quarter, review what your directors and leads have actually shipped. Not what they “contributed to” — what they delivered.
• Tie leadership roles to KPIs: If someone can’t articulate their impact with clarity and metrics, they don’t belong in a leadership position.
• Kill the safe landing zones: Stop inventing roles to protect failed hires. If someone’s not working out, offboard them transparently.
• Democratize feedback: Let ICs and juniors submit performance input on their leads, anonymously and regularly.
• End the relocation loophole: Moving someone to another country isn’t a fix. It’s an infection vector.

Because as long as clowns remain protected, real talent will keep walking out the door. And no roadmap, no marketing push, no fancy IP is enough to save a studio run by people who never should’ve been hired in the first place.

🧠 Epilogue: Burn the Framework, Build the Team

If you’ve made it this far, it’s probably because you’ve seen it too.

You’ve watched the wrong people get hired and the right ones get filtered out.
You’ve sat in rooms where nobody speaks plainly because the truth is too inconvenient.
You’ve worked under managers who couldn’t build a prototype if their careers depended on it.
You’ve submitted a portfolio with blood, sweat, and pixel-perfect precision — and been ghosted.
You’ve witnessed mediocrity flourish while brilliance quietly exits through the side door.

This isn’t just frustration. It’s systemic corrosion. And it’s costing us everything.

In a field that thrives on disruption, ingenuity, and risk, we’ve built a hiring culture based on protection, politics, and performance theater. We pretend we’re curating teams like craftsmen, but behind the scenes, we’re propping up broken hierarchies, over-credentialed gatekeepers, and a pipeline designed more to prevent friction than to foster greatness.

Here’s the summary — no sugarcoating:

• We hire friends instead of builders.
• We reject challengers in favor of culture clones.
• We allow HR generalists to act as gatekeepers to disciplines they don’t understand.
• We ignore exceptional portfolios because they unsettle fragile egos.
• And we promote the worst people in the building because firing them would be politically awkward.

The result? Studios built on fear. Projects built on sand. And games that ship in spite of the structure, not because of it.

What Must Change — Now

1. Developers must own recruitment. Not assist. Own. From role definition to final decision.
2. HR must be reimagined or removed. If it wasn’t born from games, it has no place hiring in games.
3. Portfolios must speak louder than résumés. Logos don’t build features. People do.
4. Leadership must be accountable, not bulletproof. No more lateral escapes. No more clown car promotions.
5. Culture must be inclusive of challenge. Safe spaces are not the same as stagnant ones.

And perhaps most importantly:

Hiring is game design.
Every new person added is a modifier to your progression loop. A new variable in your team’s balance table.
Hire wrong, and you don’t just slow down. You break the system.

It’s time we stopped treating hiring like logistics.
It’s creative direction. It’s production strategy.
It’s the highest-leverage decision a studio can make.

So ask yourself — whether you’re a lead, a founder, or an IC watching the gears turn:

Are we hiring people who challenge us to grow?
Or are we hiring people who protect our comfort?

Because one of those builds games.
And the other slowly burns the studio to the ground.

✍️ About the Author

This article was written by Rev Design, a consultancy founded by veteran game developers — not corporate HR generalists.

At Rev Design, we specialize in helping game studios build better teams by designing recruitment pipelines tailored specifically for the games industry. We work hands-on with your leads to define roles, evaluate candidates meaningfully, and create hiring processes that actually reflect what game development requires — creativity, collaboration, and competence.

If you’re tired of losing talent in translation, struggling with mis-hires, or watching brilliant candidates get filtered out by generic processes — we can help you fix that.

👉 Visit us at www.revdesign.jp
📩 Or reach out directly: info@revdesign.jp

Build better teams. Make better games.