A Brutal Job Hunt For A Veteran Composer
Fifty resumes, one interview. That’s the hit rate Alexander Brandon says he’s seen over the last year, despite a career that includes composing the original Deus Ex soundtrack and early Unreal games. His credits span three decades and every corner of game audio—music, direction, even the odd voice gig—yet the inbox stays quiet.
If you’ve played on PC since the late ’90s, you’ve heard Brandon’s work. Beyond Deus Ex and Unreal, he’s contributed to Stormgate, served as audio director on Wasteland 3 and Neverwinter Nights 2, and racked up voice lines as eclectic as “Flayed Goat” in Pagan Online and “Additional Mudokon Voices” in Oddworld: Soulstorm. It’s the sort of resume that should get callbacks. Lately, it hasn’t.
“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 told PC Gamer. “I’ve submitted 50 resumes and gotten one interview in the last year.”
Layoffs, Short-Term Gigs, And A Shrinking Lane
Brandon’s last full-time role was audio director at Frost Giant on Stormgate, a spiritual successor to StarCraft that struggled to attract a large player base. He was laid off in 2025, and credited CEO Tim Morten for holding on “till the bitter end in terms of keeping his people employed.”
He’s far from the only veteran on the market. Brandon says other “unbelievably senior and legendary-status people,” including Bungie’s former head of audio, have been piecing together contract work while full-time AAA roles dry up. The question he hears most often isn’t just whether someone can land a job—it’s how long that job will exist. “You have to weigh: ‘Yeah, I could get a full-time job, but how long is it going to last?’”
Studios leaning on contractors and shrinking in-house teams isn’t new, but the current wave of cuts has made that reality harder to ignore. For audio specialists, that can mean chasing shorter engagements across multiple projects, trying to stay visible while big-budget hiring freezes outlast production cycles.
AI’s Role: Useful Wrench, Not The Whole Toolkit
At this year’s Game Developers Conference, Brandon co-hosted a roundtable on AI’s impact on game audio. He also helped co-found a Special Interest Group centered on the tech after losing a mobile game contract to AI, aiming—his words—to be “like Switzerland.” The group’s mission is to gather and share information: where datasets come from, what the tools actually do, and where the ethical and legal risks live, alongside any productivity gains.
That stance hasn’t attracted developers who are firmly against AI in any form, a position Brandon says he understands but doesn’t fully 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. We care about humans.’ And I’m just like ‘All right, now let’s figure out what you mean by that.’”
Brandon describes practical wins that have nothing to do with auto-generating entire scores. He’s used AI to cut down time hunting for documentation and fiddling with middleware-to-engine hookups in Unreal. Even having an integration place a sound object in the world correctly can shave off minutes that add up over a milestone, so he can spend more of his day on creative decisions.
Pushing Back On Hype, Looking For Stability
He’s skeptical of the sales pitch that casts AI as a wholesale replacement for human work—especially while thousands in games remain out of a job. “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.”
That frustration extends to the buzzwords that make their way into roadmaps and pitches. “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.’”
The bigger picture is stark: if a composer with Brandon’s track record is sending 50 resumes and barely getting a nibble, something’s broken in how studios source, staff, and retain audio talent. AI can absolutely be a time-saver in the trenches, but it’s not a lifeline for a workforce squeezed by layoffs and short-term contracts. With another production cycle ramping up across 2026, the studios that win goodwill—especially from veterans—will be the ones that set clear expectations around hiring, explain where and how AI is used, and invest in stable roles that let creators build identity into their games’ sound. Otherwise, the silence Brandon’s hearing between applications may become the industry’s soundtrack.
