Who actually gets hired to build a game?
By 9th House Games ·
On Freelancer, about one in six closed game projects hired anyone: 139 of 853 between 27 August and 26 October 2026. Fixing or finishing someone's existing game was hired 9 times in 38, and a brand-new game 52 times in 428.
People who want a game built post it on freelance sites and most of those posts never turn into work. We counted which ones did.
Hired, by kind of work
| Kind of work | Hired | Closed | Share hired | Median top budget |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fixing or finishing an existing game | 9 | 38 | 24% | $131 |
| Art, UI, sound or video | 14 | 64 | 22% | $250 |
| Mods or servers for an existing game | 23 | 144 | 16% | $250 |
| Building a new game | 52 | 428 | 12% | $394 |
| Roblox | 6 | 83 | 7% | $250 |
| Testing | 7 | 12 | too few | $178 |
| All game projects | 139 | 853 | 16% |
“Hired” means the client awarded the project to someone. “Closed” means the project is no longer open for bids, so 77 projects still open on the day we pulled the data are left out. Testing is 7 of 12, which is too few to call a rate. Another 84 closed projects carried game skill tags but were not games (28 of them hired someone), and they are not in the chart. Hourly projects, 10 of 159, overlap the kinds above and are left out for that reason.
New games, by genre and platform
| New builds | Hired | Closed | Share hired |
|---|---|---|---|
| Education, kids, health, training | 12 | 56 | 21% |
| RPG, adventure, horror, sim | 7 | 46 | 15% |
| Real-money, casino | 5 | 46 | 11% |
| Puzzle, casual, arcade | 11 | 109 | 10% |
| Multiplayer, shooter | 6 | 70 | 9% |
| On mobile | 12 | 166 | 7% |
| On PC or console | 10 | 85 | 12% |
| On VR or AR | 11 | 82 | 13% |
| On the web | 3 | 16 | 19% |
| Platform unclear | 16 | 79 | 20% |
The new-game rate on mobile is 7%, below the 12% for new games overall. Education, kids, health and training games had the best rate of any new-game genre, and that group has its own page. Genre and platform are guessed from keywords in the title and description, and the platform split is the roughest of the lot, with 79 projects left as unclear.
What did not seem to matter
Budget size did not lift the odds. Fixed-price projects with a top budget of $1,500 or more were hired 7 times in 72, the lowest share of any fixed-price band. Projects with ten or fewer bids were hired 42 times in 123 (34%); the busiest bands were nearer 10 to 16%. Short descriptions, under 300 characters, were hired 23 times in 58. We read those last two as partly direct hires and repeat clients, who skip the crowd, but the data cannot show the cause.
How we counted
We pulled every project posted from 27 August 2026 with a game-related skill tag (Game Design, Unity, Unreal Engine, Roblox, Godot, GameMaker and similar) through Freelancer's API on 26 October. That gave 930 projects, of which 853 were closed. Kind, genre and platform come from keyword rules over the title and description, checked by hand on the awarded titles but not on all 853. Direct hires and repeat clients are inside the numbers. A project being awarded does not mean it was finished or paid, and a budget on a post is what the client asked for.
The totals are in a small file you can reuse: hire-rates.csv. If you cite this page, the citation is: 9th House Games, “Who actually gets hired to build a game?”, 27 Oct 2026, https://games.9thhouse.io/guides/who-gets-hired-to-build-a-game/.
Sources
- Freelancer.com developer documentation (the API we pulled from) (opened 27 Oct 2026)
- Our pull: 930 game-tagged projects, 27 Aug to 26 Oct 2026 (our file, counted again 27 Oct 2026)
How this page was made. The counts come from our own saved pull of Freelancer's API (26 Oct 2026, 930 projects) and were read again from the saved analysis on 27 Oct 2026. The first draft was written with AI help.
9th House Games is the games studio of 9th House in Bengaluru, run by Rohan Kulkarni. We turn a game idea into a playable test build. If you have a game idea, send it to us.