Remote Game Jobs - An Accidental Job Board
I've been a gamer since early childhood from the moment games became available into our lives. It had influenced and shaped my life big time, from improving my English (thank you Monkey Island!), to pushing me towards computer engineering studies in college. After graduation, and spending several years jumping from one job to the next, I decided I want to go on my own, and started a journey of web entrepreneurship since late 2006, and quitting my job to work full-time on my own in 2009.
Around 2014, I happened to be living in London for few months while being beside my father for treatment. And during that time, the idea of finally working on a game started to resurface again. As I was stuck there anyways, I looked for game related events around London, and landed on the popular London Indie Gamed Developers Meetup. I went there once, and enjoyed the welcoming gathering. As I started to speak more, I thought of the idea to have an online place where all these talents could connect and show their portfolio. A year later, and due to my family commitments, I hired an agency to develop the platform (BIG MISTAKE!), and I launched the now defunct development showcase platform Skirmish. It had a good start and an interest from the community. But the growth slowed down and eventually stopped.
I still knew there is a need for such site, but what I had just wasn't working. One day I did a small test and fired an email about some job openings I found on other sites. The opening and click rates through those emails was insanely high. It verified one thing for me. The one thing the community needed was jobs. So I kept the idea in my head, hoping to come back to it one day.
By end of 2019, I haven't been actively programming for a while, and decided I want to get back into it. So I began re-learning, and getting into practice. By early 2020 I was building a small job board project for a specific purpose, and partly to test myself to launch something once again. During the development, and in mid Feb, the pandemic started hitting hard, lockdown took place all over the world, and my Twitter feed started to develop a pattern. Every few hours I would see some game developer twee they have been let go, and they need a new job... remote of course!
Suddenly all the pieces started falling into place. I care deeply about the game industry, I had already been trying to help the community through Skirmish with no luck, and I was building a job board right now! Without much thinking, I checked and somehow the domain name RemoteGameJobs.com was up for grab for just $8.99! I grabbed it, forked my current project, and started repurposing it for Remote Game Jobs.
Two months later, I announced the launch of the site, with what was very strong encouragement and welcome from game talents, as the industry suddenly shifted from opposing remote work, to having to embrace it 100%. So the initial flow of users signing up for the news letter and spreading word was quite good. First few months I was mostly manually aggregating jobs while contacting studios to introduce myself and the service. Getting a word back from the studios wasn't easy though, since I wasn't a known name in the industry, and the site was fairly new. At some times, it would become extremely frustrating and disappointing when you spend an entire day trying to get one response from studios. But it was the random comments and messages of encouragement I received from people I never knew before that would be my fuel to keep going for the next few days.
Few months later, the site was clearly being welcomed by game talents, and sending good candidates across to studios. I suddenly saw a spike in paid listings that August, and in September, a person randomly messaged me saying they landed their Senior Unity Developer through Remote Game Jobs. We probably have helped others before that point, but that was the first confirmed hiring, and a senior one as well.
By that time, I knew the business was validated. I wasn't sure how long the pandemic will last, and how things will become afterwards. Initially, most jobs were Temp Remote, that I had to introduce a flag for Fully Remote positions. Fast forward November 2022, and the industry had massively adopted the remote work model. Many existing studios, big and small, are fully embracing it, and the number of Remote Only new studios is on the rise. Today, no studio posts Temp Remote on Remote Game Jobs anymore, and I'm so happy to say, remote work in the game industry is here to stay!
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