Recruit while optimizing.
There is a "baby face" in March, and there are often ** double days.
The recent gaming industry seems to be in a similar situation. In the past, Microsoft, Riot, Sony, EA and other overseas manufacturers retreated across the board, and "layoffs" were widely advanced; Later, there was the gold, silver, and fourth job hunting season, and domestic game manufacturers started a recruitment tide. And the game workers who are caught in the two storms of "going to the sea" and "going ashore" want more than to reach the flat wind zone safely.
In the Maimai community, related topics such as "whether it is worth choosing to change cities for a job", "when is the best time to change jobs", "which is more cost-effective" and other related topics were once on the hot list.
Gathering in the domestic game field, on the one hand, at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, some game companies revealed the news of cutting projects and layoffs, but most of the head companies are mainly non-game businesses and game peripheral businesses. On the other hand, with the recovery of the economic environment and the normalization of the issuance of game version numbers, the confidence in the development of the game market has gradually recovered.
Judging from the overall situation of the spring recruitment market, the competition in the job market this year has not decreased, and there have also been some changes. First of all, according to the relevant announcement of the Ministry of Education, the scale of ordinary college graduates in the country in 2024 is expected to reach 11.79 million (an increase of 210,000 year-on-year). Secondly, Tencent, NetEase and other major companies have returned to offline recruitment, and companies in the overall game industry have expanded intern positions to promote high-quality and full employment of college graduates. In addition, there is also further demand matching in terms of AI art positions and mini game company recruitment salaries.
Tencent, NetEase and other major companies have returned to offline recruitment
As the saying goes, the plan of the year lies in spring, and spring can be said to be a critical period for job hunting.
In the current context of continuous economic recovery and good company performance. Leading game companies, represented by Tencent and NetEase, have taken on an important social responsibility to promote employment while achieving development. The two most intuitive changes in the recruitment of game companies this year are: increasing the number of intern positions; Return to in-person hiring.
On March 5, Tencent officially launched its 2024 internship recruitment, opening more than 5,000 summer intern positions to 2025 graduates, a significant increase compared to the previous two years. As soon as the news was released, "Recruitment in large factories picked up? Tencent has recruited more than 500 interns", and related topics once topped the pulse hot list.
Many practitioners have followed the post and said: "Tencent has recruited a lot this year, and I hope that other manufacturers will continue to follow up and the job market will improve soon." ”In addition to Tencent, the author inquired about NetEase, miHoYo and other recruitment officials and found that the proportion of intern positions recruited by various companies in the spring this year is relatively high. In terms of recruitment of game business positions, NetEase and miHoYo spring recruitment interns account for about 50%.
Specifically, Tencent has more than 70 job requirements in five categories, including technology, products, marketing, design, and functions, involving multiple urban locations of TiMi, Photon, Rubik's Cube, and Northern Lights. NetEase Games Leihuo Business Group covers positions in game research and development, game planning, game art, game marketing, artificial intelligence and other fields. In addition, miHoYo's job classification settings are similar.
In addition to increasing the number of intern positions, returning to offline, entering the campus, and going to the college student group can be said to be a major feature of this year's spring recruitment of leading manufacturers. For example, NetEase Leihuo will open an 11-day offline information conference in mid to early April. Previously, Lei Huo had held a job search sharing meeting with Xi'an Jiaotong University and launched the "Naraka: Bladepoint" campus tour. This not only allows college students to better understand the game company, but also invisibly promotes the company's culture and popular game projects.
Coincidentally, starting from the beginning of March this year, Tencent will hold 6 campus information sessions for comprehensive jobs, more than 20 campus double selection meetings for technical positions, 3 salons for female college students, and various interesting campus flash mob activities, covering many universities in East China, North China, South China, Western China and other regions.
Frankly, it doesn't matter if there are HR hiring KPIs or other reasons. Judging from the current lively scene of the game market, it also shows the confidence of the leading game companies in the future development.
When it comes to the recruitment of game companies, miHoYo, which has been in the limelight in recent years, can be said to be the "ideal hometown" for many game practitioners.
Especially in 2020, when "Genshin Impact" was released, miHoYo's two-dimensional style swept the entire game circle. It not only raised the threshold for creation in the game industry, but also drove a wave of two-dimensional project establishment, entrepreneurship + salary increase to grab people. In the past two years, the two-dimensional project has entered the "hot to delivery period", although the primary market has gradually cooled down, miHoYo has continuously strengthened its position in the field of two-dimensional and high-quality games.
Of course, in the process of growing up, miHoYo also had "big company disease" and "founder divide and conquer" and so on. However, according to miHoYo's official website, the number of employees in the company is still about 5,000 in February last year (in June 2023, Deep Burn reported that the number of miHoYo was about 6,900 at that time).
Specifically, in the spring recruitment of 2024, miHoYo will provide a total of 153 campus recruitment positions (76 internship positions) and 423 social recruitment positions (basically full-time, with individual third-party preparations). Compared with the 160 positions recruited in the spring of 2023, considering the normal turnover of the company's operations, the scale of miHoYo's employees should be relatively stable.
However, compared with last year's spring recruitment, miHoYo has also seen some changes in the recruitment of different positions this year. In the 2023 Spring Festival school recruitment, the proportion of miHoYo program & technology, art & performance, and international positions will be %. The five directions with the highest proportion of school recruitment positions in the spring of 2024 are: 29% (44) in Art & Expression, 25% (38) in Program & Technology, 11% (17) in Internationalization, 11% (17) in Product Planning, and 14% (21) in General. The proportion of social recruitment positions is basically the same, only the product planning category is different, about 9%.
The direct takeaway from this is that the proportion of art & performance jobs has increased, and the proportion of program & technology has decreased. In this regard, the author has two guesses:
1. At present, miHoYo's game "Jeopardy Zero" is about to be launched, and the simulation mobile game "Xingbu Valley" is rumored to have basically completed development. According to one game producer, although the situation of different projects varies, generally speaking, when a larger game reaches the middle and late stages of development, as long as the pipeline is mature, it is still mainly based on the amount of heap art. The program team was relatively built in the early stage, and the art mass production positions recruited in the later stage were mainly operations and QA.
2. It is reported that "Star Cloth Valley" does not follow the art style of classic products such as "Genshin Impact" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", but the Q version of the two-dimensional (may be more biased towards "Honkai Academy 2"). In other words, once the gameplay is basically built, it needs to be actively tried, validated, and ultimately set the tone for the game's art style.
This may also be one of the reasons why the focus of miHoYo's spring recruitment positions has changed.
Small and medium-sized companies match AI art, and the salary of small games is a bit high
Of course, in addition to the above-mentioned changes in the recruitment of large manufacturers, this year's spring recruitment of game companies also reflects some trends in the industry in the past two years. For example, AIGC and mini-games.
According to recruitment platforms such as Lagou.com, after searching for keywords such as AIGC, stable diffusion, and midjourney, there is no shortage of small and medium-sized companies or teams that explicitly recruit positions such as "AIGC algorithm engineer" and "AIGC technical artist".
Of course, there are also some companies that are very stylized or use art style as a corporate symbol, and still insist on hand-drawing. However, frankly speaking, the efficiency improvement brought by AIGC tools has made it necessary for manufacturers to embrace or accept the changes brought about by new technologies, especially in the field of 2D art, and the integration of AI tools into workflows has become a common phenomenon.
I once spoke with the CEO of a game company with several hundred employees, and he told me that art assets account for almost 60% of product development costs, and after introducing AI art tools into the workflow, their 2D art asset creation time and cost have been optimized by about 50%. Many manufacturers will use Stable Diffusion to build a set of art production tools, and some manufacturers have also specially established corresponding prompt thesaurus.
However, compared to last year, the popularity of game AIGC this year is relatively not so high. For example, for AIGC technical art positions, the requirements of manufacturers for job seekers are more specific and strict, and the salary is not particularly high, and many of them are even less than 10k. This may be due to the fact that the perception of AIGC (generating 2D art assets, generating audio, etc.) is becoming more and more universal.
Secondly, with the outbreak of mini game products in the past two years, everyone has high expectations for this emerging category. Judging from the recent recruitment situation, small game planning and development engineers have also become popular positions, and the salaries of related manufacturers are not even inferior to those of large manufacturers. For example, Crazy Games, a well-known mini game manufacturer, is recruiting front-end programs, game interface designers, senior UI artists and other positions, with salaries of more than 30k.
Overall, with the gradual recovery of the economic environment and the development of the game industry, the spring recruitment in 2024 has released a positive signal to some extent.