Hiring Game Developers (Unity/Unreal) in Belarus: Tapping the Wargaming-Era Talent Pool
For twenty years, Belarus built one of the best game-development talent pools in the region. Most people outside the industry never really noticed. Then 2022 happened. Studios shrank, teams scattered, and the steady supply of senior developers that recruiters used to count on dried up fast.
A lot of hiring teams looked at that and decided the talent was simply gone. It isn’t. It relocated, regrouped, and got harder to see. That’s a very different problem, and a solvable one if you go about it the right way.
So if you’re staffing a Unity or Unreal team, don’t write this market off. It’s one of the most overlooked in Europe right now. What follows is who’s actually in the pool, how to reach them, and how to hire them without getting tangled in the messy parts.
Why Belarus built a game-dev talent pool worth chasing
Belarus earned this the slow way. The country bet on tech early and kept at it, and its engineering programs turned out capable people year after year. At its height, few places in the former Soviet bloc had an IT scene as developed. And games sat right in the middle of it, not off to the side.
Wargaming was the giant everyone knew. It was founded in Minsk in 1998, and for two decades the city stayed its biggest development studio. That’s where much of World of Tanks was built, a game that eventually crossed 160 million registered players. A whole ecosystem grew up around it: other studios, publishers, and the service shops that keep them running.
But this was never only Wargaming. Plenty of smaller mobile studios, work-for-hire teams and outsourcing shops were building for clients all over the world. That gave local developers genuine range. You get people who’ve worked across genres, platforms and business models, not narrow specialists who only ever knew one flagship title. When a hub gets that deep, the skills stick around long after any single employer packs up and leaves.
And that’s the bit worth paying attention to. These people have shipped. Not built a nice demo in a bootcamp; shipped. They’ve launched and run live products at serious scale, which is exactly the kind of experience you can’t really read off a CV and can’t teach in a hurry. You’re often getting it here for a good deal less than the same person would cost in Western Europe.
What the “Wargaming era” actually left behind
One thing to get straight first. Don’t talk as if the past few years never occurred. The people you want to hire lived through them, and skipping past that is one of the quickest ways to lose a candidate.
Wargaming pulled out of Russia and Belarus in April 2022 and closed the Minsk studio it had grown from. About 2,400 people were working there when it happened. That closure really did mark the end of something for the local industry.
Wargaming wasn’t the only one, though. A broader move away from the country had been underway since 2020, and it accelerated fast afterward. But most of the senior people didn’t leave the industry. They relocated, largely to Poland and Lithuania, and kept doing the work.
None of which is to pretend the market looks like it did in 2019. It doesn’t, and the Belarusian IT sector has contracted since 2022. Harder to find, sure. Impossible, no. If anything, a senior engineer who’s already relocated and settled into remote work can be easier to get hold of than someone still comfortable in their old job, and more willing to hear you out. The talent is still there. It’s just spread across more places now, and you have to look accordingly.
The three talent pools you’re really hiring from
It also helps to stop treating “Belarusian game developers” as one bucket. There are really three groups here, and they don’t all want the same things from you.
Developers who stayed
Plenty of good mid- and senior-level developers never left. For some it was a deliberate choice, for others just how things worked out. Whatever the reason, they tend to cost less than their experience warrants, and they’re the easiest people to bring on for on-site or hybrid work. If you’ve got a local setup, this is where your money stretches the furthest. Treat them well and move quickly, and they usually sign.
The diaspora
Companies miss this group over and over. Thousands of experienced engineers, leads and producers moved abroad during the wider tech exodus, but a move isn’t a clean break. They’ve kept their contacts, their language, and colleagues who are still back home. All of that makes them well suited to remote work, and now and then a good enough offer will pull one of them into relocating again. The thing to remember is that their situation has changed. What they want now is flexibility, a bit of stability, and a real sense of where the job is headed.
The rising generation
With fewer senior people around, juniors got their opening, and many of them are eager to prove it. If you can think past this quarter’s headcount and build for the long run, there’s a lot to work with. Pair a couple of experienced leads with a good crop of juniors and you can put together a full team that grows alongside your product instead of being bolted on later.
How to spot real Unity and Unreal talent
Spotting the good ones isn’t all that different here. The local context just shifts which signals matter most.
With Unity, “I know C#” means almost nothing on its own. Look for shipped mobile or cross-platform titles, someone who has actually profiled and fixed performance, and real live-ops experience: the events, updates and monetization work that keeps a game earning months after launch. Ex-Wargaming CVs tend to be strong on exactly this, which is a good reason to hire Unity developers through a screen that checks for shipped work rather than buzzword bingo.
With Unreal, you’re after C++ that holds up, sensible use of Blueprints (and the judgment to know when to skip them), and hands-on time with rendering, netcode or big open-world performance. Ask what systems a candidate personally owned from start to finish. Not the well-known games they were loosely attached to. The specific thing they built and had to make work.
Pay attention to how someone works, not just how well they code. Most of these roles are remote, often across a few time zones, so it matters whether a person writes clearly, keeps people posted, and can be trusted to work on their own. The most talented developer on your team is a liability if they vanish for a week and the rest of the sprint stalls waiting on them. Those habits are worth checking for.
On skill itself, a portfolio beats a certificate every time. Look at what someone has actually shipped. Better still, get them talking about a tough decision they had to make on a project, especially one that went wrong and what it cost to fix. You’ll learn more in that conversation than from any qualification on paper. Sorting for that kind of depth is the real value of a good IT recruitment service, well before a thin CV reaches you.
Sourcing tactics that work in Belarus right now
Job boards on their own won’t get you far. The people you want are passive, and the very best are often abroad. A few things that actually work:
Say something real. This crowd has shipped products and can smell a vague, copy-paste job ad from a mile off. Name the engine, the platform, how the team is set up, and the problems they’d actually be solving. Specifics tell them you know what you’re building, and that you’d be a decent place to build it.
Referrals do most of the heavy lifting here. It’s a small industry, people talk, and a good word from someone respected opens doors a job post never will. That kind of pull takes time to build, but that’s also why a rival can’t just buy it out from under you.
Money matters too. Pay has moved with the market, and these days a lot of remote roles get quoted in dollars or euros rather than local rates, so if your numbers are out of date, candidates just quietly move on. Look at current salary benchmarks before you send an offer and you’ll stay in the running without overpaying.
And tell people what the job actually looks like. Remote or hybrid? Any help with relocation? Put it in the ad. Senior developers think about freedom and stability as much as money, and if you’re vague, they assume you’re hiding something.
Choosing a hiring model: EOR, outstaffing, or direct
How you take people on matters nearly as much as who you take on. Three routes cover most situations.
Direct employment gets you the tightest integration and suits on-site teams. The catch is that you’re the one handling entity setup, contracts and local compliance. Most control, most paperwork.
Outstaffing lets you scale a team up or down in a hurry while someone else carries the admin. It’s handy for project work, or when you’d rather test the water before committing properly. A local outstaffing setup can have a working squad in place in weeks, not months.
An Employer of Record is usually the quickest compliant way to hire one person without opening your own entity. On paper the provider is the legal employer and takes care of payroll, tax and paperwork, while the developer works for you day to day. If you need speed and compliance at the same time, employer-of-record and payroll services lift the worst of it off your plate.
None of these is the “right” answer. It comes down to your timeline, your budget, and how much admin you’re willing to stomach.
Mistakes that cost you the best candidates
The most common mistake is assuming there’s no one left to hire. The news made it sound that way. It wasn’t that simple. Yes, a lot of IT specialists left, but new people were entering the field the entire time. Companies that quit on Belarus mostly just left the talent for someone else to find.
Watch out for hiring a résumé line instead of a person, too. “Ex-Wargaming” tells you where someone worked. It doesn’t tell you what they did there, or whether they were any good. Ask about the actual work. What did they build? What did they own?
Don’t forget the people who left the country. A search that stops at the border misses a huge chunk of the senior talent, and those are often the ones happiest to take a remote role.
Speed matters more than people think. The good developers usually have a couple of offers going at once. Drag your process out or leave them guessing, and they’ll take the job from the company that was quicker and clearer about what it wanted.
Frequently asked questions
Yes. A lot of senior people left after 2022, but plenty of talent is still around, both inside the country and in a diaspora that stays plugged into the local scene. Approach it the right way and you can reach experienced Unity and Unreal developers, usually at rates well under Western Europe.
They’ve shipped and run games at real scale. Anyone who came up around World of Tanks and the wider Minsk scene worked on products with millions of players, so they bring hands-on depth in performance, monetization and long-term live-ops that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Depends which group you’re after. The people who stayed fit on-site and hybrid roles; the ones who relocated are perfect for remote. Whatever you pick, spell it out in the job ad. It’s one of the biggest things that decides whether strong candidates bother applying at all.
It varies with seniority, engine and working model, and remote roles are increasingly priced in dollars or euros. The market has shifted, so use current salary data rather than older local figures if you want your offers to actually land.
An Employer of Record, in most cases. The EOR is the legal employer and handles payroll, tax and compliance, so you can bring someone on within days without setting up a company of your own in the country.
A local specialist already knows who’s available, where they are and what they’re expecting, and can check for real shipped experience before a CV ever reaches you. That’s the difference between a slow, uncertain hunt and a tight shortlist of people who fit your stack and your setup.
Turning the pool into your team
To put it plainly: the Wargaming-era talent pool is real, it’s excellent, and it’s more within reach than the headlines let on. It’s also scattered across borders and working arrangements in a way that rewards knowing the ground and punishes guessing.
That’s where a partner on the ground earns their keep. Knowing who stayed, who moved, what they’re paid now and how to hire them cleanly is the gap between a three-month slog and a three-week shortlist. If you’d sooner jump straight to real candidates than start from zero, get in touch and put a local team on it.