David Musgrove, President of the Professional Electronic Entertainment Recruiters association (PEER) says that there will be a shortage of video game development talent in the coming years due to the declining economy and gamers expecting bigger, better games which puts a demand on larger console development teams.

“As the Video Game Industry’s recruitment association and advocacy group, we are seeing clear signs that games content development will be significantly impacted for 2008 and beyond, especially taking the declining US Economy into account”, continues Musgrove. “The reason is simply that there won’t be enough seasoned talent available to support that anticipated growth, particularly in the area of engineering. Even if the economy gets worse resulting in layoffs, the best people are seldom turned out, and usually prefer to stay where they are in an atmosphere of financial uncertainty. So the pressure will build in an already overheated candidate driven market.”

There was no mention of Indie or Casual game development in this release. Sure, a lot of released titles aren’t your blockbuster commercial games, but most are creative and cheaper to develop.

PEER has documented the following trends that corroborate these findings:

1- Consumers expect better games every year supported by higher technology game consoles – because publishers and game platform manufacturers compete on the basis of bigger/better; resulting in even more powerful consoles in the wings and bigger games on the horizon, requiring larger development teams and more project management on the order of 2-3x previous numbers;

2- Demand for larger console development teams is already draining the experienced talent pool – even from the PC games space to fill the gap – that will put more demand on talent shortfalls now for PC games as well;

3- Shortfalls for key positions puts upward pressure on salaries for longer work hours and on monetary incentives to attract and keep experienced people, which further cuts into profits, and publishers are faced with tougher choices on awarding big contracts to developers, who typically stay lean, but have to ramp up sharply when they get a new contract; ramping up quickly is much tougher in a thinner talent market.

“Bottom-line, without a more effective address to the problem, real experienced talent acquisition in the games industry will only get tougher,” continues Musgrove. “As President of the industry’s association of recruiters, we have a birds-eye view of this, and we are concerned about their biggest expense yet – key positions which will remain unfilled. Growing more internal recruiting alone is insufficient to the task. We advocate a co-operative team approach for better solutions and recommend closer co-ordination between internal and external recruiting resources to meet the growing demands in order to realize the profit projections the industry is counting on achieving.”