A Veteran Hits A Wall

Fifty resumes, one interview. That’s how the last year has gone for Alexander Brandon, the composer behind Deus Ex and Unreal, who told PC Gamer he’s struggled to land a steady role despite three decades in game audio.

Brandon’s credits stretch from composing on landmark PC shooters to directing audio on Wasteland 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2, plus the kind of unglamorous voice and sound work that keeps projects moving. On paper, it reads like a career that should open doors. In 2026, it’s not doing that.

Full-Time Roles Are Drying Up

“My take on things is: Full-time is far less likely, high-paying full-time is probably more competitive than it’s ever been,” Brandon said in an interview with PC Gamer. “I’ve submitted 50 resumes and gotten one interview in the last year.”

His last full-time post was audio director at Frost Giant on Stormgate, a spiritual successor to StarCraft that, per PC Gamer, has struggled to pull in players. Brandon was laid off in 2025 and credited CEO Tim Morten for hanging on “till the bitter end in terms of keeping his people employed.”

He’s far from alone. Brandon said other “unbelievably senior and legendary-status people,” including Bungie’s former head of audio, have been pushed toward contract work as top-tier studios post fewer permanent openings. “You have to weigh: ‘Yeah, I could get a full-time job, but how long is it going to last?’” he said.

Cautious On AI, Not Anti-AI

At GDC this year, Brandon co-hosted a roundtable on AI’s impact on game audio. He helped co-found a Special Interest Group focused on the technology after losing a mobile game contract to AI. The group aims to be “like Switzerland,” as he put it, weighing productivity gains against ethical concerns and legal risks, and pushing for transparency around where training data comes from.

That stance hasn’t drawn in developers who oppose any AI use, a view Brandon respects but doesn’t share. “It’s better to say: ‘AI scares me. I am very, very concerned about it. I have questions. I want to know if I’m going to lose my job. I want to know that humans still really matter.’ Of course, the tool vendors that we’ve talked to that have joined the working group all say ‘Oh my gosh, humans absolutely matter.’ And I’m just like ‘All right, now let’s figure out what you mean by that.’”

He also described grounded, unsexy use cases. AI has helped him cut down on hunting through documentation and dealing with the quirks of audio middleware in engines like Unreal. Having AI integration place a sound object correctly in a game world saved real setup time and let him focus on creative direction instead of fiddly plumbing.

Hype Fatigue Meets A Frayed Job Market

That pragmatism clashes with the industry’s louder promises. “There are CEOs saying nobody’s going to have a job in, like, two seconds, and we’re all going to be in a utopia,” Brandon said. “Money’s just going to flow into our mailboxes and we’re going to turn into Wall-E or whatever. I’m just like, stop the techbro crap—I think people are sick of that.”

He bristled at the pressure to imitate boosterish language. “People drink all of this Kool-Aid and are like ‘if we don’t use this language, we are behind.’ We need to be behind. We need to acknowledge our limitations, and we need to be able to say, as humans, ‘we can’t keep pushing ourselves through this shitty economy and shitty situation.’ Not to soapbox too much.”

Pull back, and a picture emerges of an audio field caught between shrinking headcounts and faster tooling. Veterans are piecing together contracts, studios are hedging on long-term hires, and AI sits in the middle—useful for grunt work, volatile for careers, and still largely opaque in how it’s trained. Brandon’s working group wants receipts and clear boundaries; most developers would settle for stable jobs and credit where it’s due.

Where does that leave the next season of game audio? Somewhere practical. If studios want distinctive soundscapes, they’ll still need humans making judgment calls—taste, theme, timing—while any AI gains should be paired with data transparency, consent, and staffing that lasts longer than a milestone. Keep an eye on that GDC-born group and how big teams staff audio through the next wave of releases. If someone like Brandon is knocking this hard, the industry’s doors aren’t just closed—they’re creaking.