Gene Grand once sat across from a young operations manager who had just turned down an offer from a competing gaming company, despite a meaningful pay bump on the table. When Grand asked why, the answer surprised him a little.
It wasn’t about the money at all.
“She told me she didn’t trust that the new company would still feel like a place she wanted to build a career, not just take a job,” Grand recalls. “That conversation has stuck with me.”
“It’s a talent problem that compensation alone can’t solve.”
Purpose Gets People in the Door, But It Doesn’t Keep Them There
There’s a well-worn idea in this industry that passion for gaming is enough to build a workforce around. Grand has never fully bought into that, and the research increasingly backs his instinct.
Purpose remains the most common reason employees say they join gaming companies in the first place, according to Bain research.
But Grand is quick to point out where that research goes further, and where a lot of leadership teams stop listening too early. Purpose gets someone through the door.
Over time, it’s work-life balance, compensation, and supportive leadership that become just as important, if not more so, for actually keeping that person on the team.
Passion, in Grand’s view, is a great recruiting tool and a terrible retention strategy on its own. Companies that lean entirely on “we make games people love” as their pitch to employees are likely to keep losing their best people to competitors who offer that same passion, plus everything else.
A Market Where Demand Keeps Outpacing Supply
The scale of the challenge has grown alongside the industry itself. Gaming job postings have increased by roughly 40% over the past three years.
That pace of demand has outstripped the talent pipeline in a lot of specialised roles.
Grand sees this playing out most acutely at the executive and senior specialist level, where the cost of getting a hire wrong is highest and the pool of truly qualified candidates is smallest.
Broader hiring research backs this up, with a majority of recruiters now reporting real difficulty finding candidates with the right specialised skills.
Everyone is competing for the same narrow band of experienced leaders, as Grand describes it, and that scarcity changes the whole negotiation.
It’s no longer really about convincing someone to consider you. It’s about giving them a reason not to leave once they’re already inside your organisation.
In gaming specifically, that competition has sharpened around a handful of newer leadership profiles, executives who can navigate AI, Web3, and player-driven ecosystems with real fluency rather than surface familiarity.
What Senior Leaders Are Actually Weighing
According to Gartner, 60% of senior leaders cite a lack of career growth and evolving roles as their primary consideration when deciding whether to stay or move on. Grand thinks this statistic gets misread constantly.
Usually in the direction of assuming it’s really about title inflation or faster promotions.
“It’s not about the next job title,” he argues. “It’s about whether someone can see a version of their career, five years out, that still excites them inside this organisation.”
“If leadership can’t paint that picture credibly, compensation becomes the only lever left, and that’s an expensive way to run a retention strategy.”
Listening Before People Decide to Leave
One practice Grand has come to respect, wherever he’s encountered it, is the confidential leadership listening session. Top gaming companies are now running these quarterly.
They create an informal but candid space for conversations about challenges, purpose, and whether an executive’s day-to-day work still aligns with the vision they signed up for.
Companies that only ask their senior people how they’re doing during an annual review are, in Grand’s experience, always going to be surprised by resignations. The ones running quarterly listening sessions rarely are.
They can see the shift in someone’s energy months before it turns into a resignation letter.
There’s also a technology layer to this that Grand thinks is underdiscussed. AI-powered tools can now identify engagement patterns and workload trends well before they escalate into full burnout.
That gives HR and talent leaders the chance to intervene proactively rather than reactively.
He’s careful, though, to frame this as a support tool rather than a replacement for genuine leadership attention. The data can tell you where to look, but it can’t have the conversation for you.
The companies getting this right are using AI to flag where a human conversation needs to happen sooner, not to avoid having it altogether.
Building Organisations People Actually Want to Stay In
The opportunity in front of gaming executives right now, as Grand frames it, isn’t really about winning a single hiring cycle. It’s about building organisations where talented people choose to build long careers.
That means combining the sector’s undeniable appeal with the kind of professional development and leadership support that sustains people through the inevitable rough patches.
“The industry’s biggest natural advantage is that people already want to work in it,” he says. “The only way you lose that advantage is by failing to build everything else around it.”
“That’s a solvable problem, but it takes deliberate effort, and it never fully finishes.”
Lynn Martelli is an editor at Readability. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and has worked as an editor for over 10 years. Lynn has edited a wide variety of books, including fiction, non-fiction, memoirs, and more. In her free time, Lynn enjoys reading, writing, and spending time with her family and friends.
