Q&A with Amir Satvat, publishing producer for Amazon Games

amazongames.com:

Amir, looking at those who have found success in the games industry, there’s no one universal story of personal passion or career trajectory. Can you tell us a bit about your own journey to Amazon Games?

Since age 4, I dreamt of working on video games. I resolved to spend my whole life becoming knowledgeable about the space: Playing over 2,100 titles, reading industry publications and forums, meeting those in the space, and understanding both how games and the industries around them—like merchandising, competitive games, and transmedia—function.

When I graduated college, I spent 15 years applying for games roles. Throughout that time, jobs were available, but generally on the West Coast, and I was not willing to move. The only thing that trumped games were my family and friends, and they mostly lived in New England.

I resolved never to give up and pursued other interesting options. I spent over a decade in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, in business/corporate development and strategy/operations at Dell EMC, VMware, the Advisory Board, and Veeam. I also spent five years in graduate school pursuing three master’s degrees. Knowing career skills are highly transferable across industries, I built a baseline of abilities I could eventually use in video games.

My career with Amazon started at AWS as COO for the Inside Sales and Demand Generation businesses in the Americas. In late 2020, with full support of my AWS leaders, I went to Prime Gaming as a business development lead.

Working in games was always about more than a job—it was a green light to meet games industry friends and to talk about games industry topics in ways I had always wanted. My time at Prime Gaming enabled this.

I had a further dream, though. While working