The winner of The Game Awards' 'Game Changer' award is now a target of online hate

Summary

Amir Satvat, the recipient of the TGA's “Game Changer” award, created a job placement project helping 3,000 people.
Satvat has received hate mail for working at Tencent, which some blame for layoffs in the industry.
The lack of mention of Tencent in Satvat's award is due to the fact that it focused on its results and not its employer.

The recipient of The Game Awards 2024 Award-winning “Game Changer,” Amir Satvat, currently finds himself the target of online hate and abuse. This year, the Game Awards introduced a new award to recognize Satvat, who stepped up during this historically difficult time in the gaming industry and made a significant impact.

In recent years, layoffs in the gaming industry have reached unprecedented levels, and the trend seems unstoppable. According to Satvat, 34 thousand jobs have been lost in just three years. Many interested people will have seen a Google Sheets document that started being shared on social media a couple of years ago, which provided a comprehensive and regularly updated list of games companies that were hiring, sortable by function and location and providing links directly to the job application pages. This project, the brainchild of Amir Satvat, has turned into a real website where job seekers and those entering the gaming industry can find each other and has so far led to almost 3,000 people finding work.

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Amir Satvat, a game developer with a keen eye for numbers and data who currently serves as Director of Business Development at Tencent, has dedicated over 2,000 hours to his Games Community project. It's no surprise that he was the first recipient of the TGA's “Game Changer” award. “You can't make great games without great people,” Satvat said during his acceptance speech while discussing the negative impact this seemingly endless wave of layoffs has had on game development. However, what should have been the highlight of Satvat's career turned sour, as the game developer has received hateful and offensive messages since that joyous moment at The Game Awards and has even been the subject of hit pieces from some average. “This is the 'reward' for two years of service,” Satvat said in a LinkedIn post discussing the matter.

Game Awards 'Game Changer' recipient targeted by haters online

Satvat revealed that he had received “countless hateful messages” on several social media sites, targeting not only him but his family. Much of this vitriol contains anti-Semitic slurs (Satvat is not Jewish, but his wife is) or questions his mental faculties. And the reason for all this hatred, according to the award winner, is the fact that he works at Tencent and was not mentioned at The Game Awards. People accuse him of being an establishment or agent of the company, even though Satvat's job placement project began well before he joined Tencent. Furthermore, he claims that the lack of mention of his current employer is simply because such information is irrelevant to the achievements that earned him the “Game Changer” award.

Part of the dislike for Tencent stems from the fact that the Chinese tech conglomerate has been a major contributor to layoffs in the sector in recent years. In November, Tencent subsidiary behind Exobornedeveloper Sharkmob, canceled a title without warning and laid off much of its staff. Just before that, in October, Tequila Works, whose parent company is Tencent, also faced layoffs after a game was canceled without warning. Visions of ManaDeveloper Ouka Studios reportedly shut down completely after the game's release in August, and the list goes on until the wave of layoffs began and beyond.