I Can Be There in Eight Days

A report­ed field note with researched con­text. Game Access, Brno, May 2026.

Brno, late May, the sec­ond day of Game Access 2026. Two men sit on the stage who between them have racked up more moves than some mov­ing com­pa­nies. Miloš Jeřábek, exec­u­tive pro­duc­er at Ten­cent, has worked across coun­tries and stu­dios. Lukáš Codr runs qual­i­ty assur­ance at Vir­tu­os. The pro­gramme blurb promis­es an hon­est con­ver­sa­tion about inter­na­tion­al relo­ca­tion: raw, fun­ny, prac­ti­cal, and explic­it­ly not cor­po­rate answers. [1]

That is exact­ly what they deliv­er. Their post­ings read like a flight sched­ule: Ire­land, Malaysia, Fin­land, Min­sk, Czechia, Poland. One of them tells the anec­dote that sets the whole tone. For a new job abroad, he was offered a pick­up at the air­port so he would find his way to the office. His reac­tion: if I can't even get from the air­port to the office on my own, maybe I should­n't be mov­ing to this coun­try at all. He found the way him­self, back before Google Maps and trans­la­tion apps, with some effort, but he got there.

The same atti­tude in anoth­er scene. For a job offer abroad, he was asked when he could be there. His answer was not hes­i­ta­tion but arith­metic. A visa for Chi­na takes sev­en days, the flight one day, so eight days. Any­one who answers like that left the ques­tion of whether he can do it behind long ago.

He describes the stance behind it like this: lay a shad­ow of the for­eign cul­ture over your­self, show respect, and accept that you do not change the cul­ture, you adapt to it.

That is the tone: some­one who loves mov­ing and still sug­ar­coats noth­ing. One of their remarks stayed with me in par­tic­u­lar. Sta­tis­ti­cal­ly, one of them said, 75 per­cent of rela­tion­ships break down in the process. Not every­thing from the old life trav­els to the new place. I tried to ver­i­fy that num­ber lat­er. What I found instead is fur­ther down, because it is more reveal­ing than the num­ber itself.

The difficulty is assigned

Any­one who moves as a senior with a spe­cialised skill, the two of them said, relo­cates on Easy Mode. Any­one at the start of a career plays Hard Mode: in com­pe­ti­tion with the local junior tal­ent, and as a junior you can't even get a Chi­na visa as a val­ued work­er. What worked for them: a dis­tinc­tive port­fo­lio and a net­work that was already there.

Easy Mode, Hard Mode. The term comes from gam­ing, and it fits because it shows how dif­fer­ent­ly easy or hard a work-dri­ven move can be for dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Unlike in a game, though, you do not set the dif­fi­cul­ty of a move your­self. It is assigned, before the first step, by things that have noth­ing to do with courage or adapt­abil­i­ty. The pass­port, the lan­guage, the income, the indus­try, gen­der, and the ques­tion of whether some­one comes along and is allowed to work there.

The two on stage speak from Easy Mode, and they know it. Four of the dials that decide this can be backed with research. Each shows the same pat­tern: the dif­fi­cul­ty rarely lies in the per­son. It lies in the con­di­tions.

First dial: the passport

One of them put it in a for­mu­la: Euro­pean law makes mov­ing eas­i­er, and most gam­ing jobs in Europe run in Eng­lish. Inside the EU, relo­ca­tion is legal­ly the Easy Mode. Free move­ment means no visa, no employ­er decid­ing on your right to stay, no count­down after a dis­missal. Any­one com­ing from out­side plays a dif­fer­ent game. The right to stay hangs on the work con­tract, the con­tract on the employ­er, and so a great deal more than the salary hangs on the employ­er. A dis­missal is then not a career dent but a dead­line.

The sta­tis­tics trace the divid­ing line. Accord­ing to Euro­stat data, third-coun­try nation­als in the EU are almost twice as like­ly as locals to work below their qual­i­fi­ca­tion, rough­ly 39 against 21 per­cent in 2023. [2] The pass­port decides not only whether you may come. It also helps decide what your work is worth once you are there.

Second dial: the degree

The OECD has spent years study­ing what hap­pens to qual­i­fi­ca­tions when they cross a bor­der. The result can be put blunt­ly: they lose val­ue. Mea­sur­ably. On the OECD aver­age, 27 per­cent of high­ly edu­cat­ed immi­grants with a for­eign qual­i­fi­ca­tion are not in employ­ment, and a fur­ther 26 per­cent work for­mal­ly overqual­i­fied. For high­ly edu­cat­ed peo­ple with a qual­i­fi­ca­tion earned in the coun­try, the same fig­ures sit at 20 and 18 per­cent. [3]

The most strik­ing find­ing: for labour-mar­ket prospects, where the qual­i­fi­ca­tion was earned counts for more than where the per­son is from. Not who you are, but where your diplo­ma was print­ed. Recog­ni­tion pro­ce­dures can cor­rect this; they improve employ­ment chances and earn­ings con­sid­er­ably. But very few go through them, and the pro­ce­dures are slow, frag­ment­ed, and in many pro­fes­sions sim­ply unknown. [3] A sys­tem that has a cor­rec­tion mech­a­nism and makes it avail­able to almost no one does not, strict­ly speak­ing, have one.

The two on stage knew the prac­ti­cal coun­ter­part. The most valu­able relo­ca­tion ser­vice, they said, is not the mov­ing com­pa­ny but a local per­son who comes along to every offi­cial appoint­ment and helps with the paper­work. And you have to learn the lan­guage, they added, or you will nev­er get the infor­ma­tion that mat­ters. [1]

Third dial: the person beside you

One of them, on the road for years him­self, said a sen­tence that strips the glam­our out of expat life: I have more air miles than some pilots, I'm 47, divorced, no chil­dren. And then: it is much hard­er for the ones who move with you. [1]

Relo­ca­tion research has known this fig­ure since the eight­ies, and it almost nev­er appears in the sto­ries about the brave step: the accom­pa­ny­ing part­ner. In Eng­lish long called the trail­ing spouse, a term that car­ries the prob­lem in it. Trail­ing, in sec­ond place.

A study of 258 dual-career cou­ples showed as far back as the late nineties that the stress of an assign­ment runs large­ly through the part­ner's sit­u­a­tion. [4] In review arti­cles on assign­ment research, the accom­pa­ny­ing part­ner's career wor­ries, their resis­tance to the move, and the strain on the rela­tion­ship are still among the most fre­quent­ly report­ed rea­sons an assign­ment fails. [9] Put dif­fer­ent­ly: whether a move suc­ceeds is often decid­ed not by the per­son with the job, but by the per­son who gave up every­thing else for that job. In that sense she car­ries the Hard Mode so that some­one else can play the Easy Mode. Most often, that per­son is a woman. [10]

Fourth dial: the numbers themselves

Back to the 75 per­cent from the stage. I could not ver­i­fy the num­ber, in any study I found. Per­haps it is the hon­est life bal­ance of a man who has seen it hap­pen often enough. As a robust sta­tis­tic, as far as I know, it does not exist.

Along the way I ran into some­thing that puts the whole ques­tion in a dif­fer­ent light. The best-known num­ber in expat research, the claim that 25 to 40 per­cent of all for­eign assign­ments fail, is demon­stra­bly a myth. In 1995 Anne-Wil Harz­ing took apart the field­'s cita­tion chains and showed that the num­ber goes back to three much-quot­ed arti­cles, only one of which con­tained any empir­i­cal data, and that data put fail­ure rates rather low. For decades a research field described a cri­sis that had nev­er been evi­denced that way, because every­one copied from every­one else instead of check­ing. [5]

That is more than a foot­note for meth­ods enthu­si­asts. It means that even the knowl­edge about fail­ing to arrive is stuck inside its own unchecked sto­ry. And it means, for any piece like this one, the 75 per­cent from the stage includ­ed: the dra­mat­ic num­ber is the one you have to check twice.

An aside on their industry

That it was two game devel­op­ers hold­ing this con­ver­sa­tion is no acci­dent. The indus­try demands inter­na­tion­al mobil­i­ty like few oth­ers, and it has at the same time thinned the nets that catch a move gone wrong. How thin became clear again on 10 June, when Ubisoft announced the clo­sure of two stu­dios, Win­nipeg with around 65 staff and Bel­grade with around 100, along with 51 lay­offs in Barcelona as the site was refo­cused on the Rain­bow Six line and fur­ther cuts in San Fran­cis­co and across glob­al pub­lish­ing, up to 380 posi­tions in all. [8] It was the com­pa­ny's sixth round of lay­offs this year alone, part of a sav­ings pro­gramme of rough­ly 500 mil­lion euros. Any­one who changed coun­tries for a stu­dio like that learns the dials above in the hard order. That is an inten­si­fi­ca­tion of the gen­er­al pat­tern, not an excep­tion to it.

Hard Mode has no direction

That arriv­ing depends on which lay­er of a sys­tem you arrive in, I have described before, with Esto­ni­a's e‑Residency sys­tem: fric­tion­less on the out­side, sticky on the inside, and the fric­tion catch­es you whether you move or not. [6] The two on stage in Brno spoke about one direc­tion only, leav­ing. That the dif­fi­cul­ty does not even hang on that direc­tion is not a thought from the stage. It came to me a week ear­li­er, in Tallinn, in a con­ver­sa­tion about com­ing back.

The per­son I spoke to had returned from France, where he had lived and worked for a long time. Now he found him­self puz­zled when an acquain­tance men­tioned not hav­ing seen a mutu­al friend since Jan­u­ary, even though the two live only a city apart. His com­ment: the coun­try real­ly isn't that big.

He con­nect­ed this to the Eston­ian ten­den­cy to make things cosy at home, and not only dur­ing the long dark sea­son, and to the fact that super­fi­cial social con­tact means lit­tle to many here. It is the same Eston­ian reserve that makes arriv­ing hard for new­com­ers and sud­den­ly estranges those who come home. What he describes is not home­sick­ness, and not the strange­ness of a new place. It is the fric­tion of return: home has not changed, he has.

Research knows the phe­nom­e­non and con­firms its coun­ter­in­tu­itive sever­i­ty. For many, com­ing back is hard­er than leav­ing. Any­one who leaves expects strange­ness and often gets prepa­ra­tion and sup­port. Any­one who returns expects famil­iar­i­ty and gets noth­ing, because almost no one treats the return as a tran­si­tion. [7] So the dif­fi­cul­ty does not even hang on the direc­tion. It hangs on whether any­one, your­self includ­ed, takes the step seri­ous­ly as a tran­si­tion at all.

What stays

We tell moves as courage sto­ries, and the courage is real. But courage is rough­ly even­ly dis­trib­uted. The con­di­tions are not. The pass­port, the degree, the per­son beside you, the reli­a­bil­i­ty of the num­bers we use to talk about all of it: those are the dials the dif­fi­cul­ty is set with, long before any­one packs the first box.

One of the two on stage said it always comes down to pur­pose: why do I want to leave at all, what am I look­ing for, what does my cur­rent place not give me? [1] A good ques­tion, and one you can only afford when the pass­port, the degree, and the net­work are already in order. Any­one who arrived on Easy Mode is quick to mis­take their own arrival for a mat­ter of atti­tude.

That is the qui­etest effect of the whole mech­a­nism: it makes its win­ners blind to them­selves. The ques­tion is not who man­ages the step. The ques­tion is which lev­el some­one has to take it on, and who set that lev­el.

A note on report­ing

This is a field note with researched con­text, not a full report. The start­ing point is a pub­lic stage talk at Game Access in Brno (May 2026). The author was a lis­ten­er in the audi­ence, not an inter­view­er. The two speak­ers' state­ments are giv­en as para­phrase from the author's own notes and rec­ol­lec­tion, not as ver­ba­tim quotes. The con­ver­sa­tion part­ner from Tallinn is kept anony­mous. The research find­ings come from the sources list­ed below.

Sources (expand if need­ed)

[1] Stage talk: Miloš Jeřábek (Ten­cent) and Lukáš Codr (Vir­tu­os), "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Mov­ing Abroad", Game Access, Brno, 29 May 2026, Forum stage; and the event pro­gramme text. The author was a lis­ten­er in the audi­ence. The state­ments repro­duced here are para­phras­es from the author's own notes and rec­ol­lec­tion; no ver­ba­tim quo­ta­tion is claimed.

[2] Euro­stat, Migrant inte­gra­tion sta­tis­tics - over-qual­i­fi­ca­tion (dataset lfsa_eoqgan; news release of 26 July 2024). Ver­i­fied find­ing: in 2023, employed non-EU cit­i­zens in the EU were "almost twice as like­ly" to be over-qual­i­fied as nation­als (39.4% against 20.8%); EU for­eign­ers stood at 31.3%. The fig­ure refers to cit­i­zen­ship, not to where the qual­i­fi­ca­tion was earned (for the lat­ter, see [3]).

[3] OECD (2017), Mak­ing Inte­gra­tion Work: Assess­ment and Recog­ni­tion of For­eign Qual­i­fi­ca­tions. OECD Pub­lish­ing. Key fig­ures: 27% not in employ­ment / 26% overqual­i­fied with a for­eign qual­i­fi­ca­tion, against 20% / 18% with a domes­tic one; the place where the qual­i­fi­ca­tion was earned mat­ters more than the per­son­'s ori­gin; low take-up of recog­ni­tion pro­ce­dures.

[4] Har­vey, M. (1998), Dual-career cou­ples dur­ing inter­na­tion­al relo­ca­tion: The trail­ing spouse. Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Human Resource Man­age­ment, 9(2), 309-331. Sur­vey of 258 dual-career cou­ples.

[5] Harz­ing, A.-W. (1995), The per­sis­tent myth of high expa­tri­ate fail­ure rates. Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Human Resource Man­age­ment, 6(2), 457-474. Also: Harz­ing, A.-W. (2002), Are our ref­er­enc­ing errors under­min­ing our schol­ar­ship and cred­i­bil­i­ty? The case of expa­tri­ate fail­ure rates. Jour­nal of Orga­ni­za­tion­al Behav­ior, 23, 127-148.

[6] Björn Burghard, "Built for Dis­tance", Way­cleft, 4 June 2026. waycleft.com/built-for-distance. (Ear­li­er field note of my own: the lay­er mod­el of arriv­ing, Esto­ni­a's dig­i­tal vs. phys­i­cal belong­ing, Eston­ian reserve in the social space.)

[7] Szkud­larek, B. (2010), Reen­try - A review of the lit­er­a­ture. Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Inter­cul­tur­al Rela­tions, 34(1), 1-21. Ver­i­fied find­ing: return is a tran­si­tion in its own right and a poor­ly sup­port­ed one; the prob­lems of return arrive "large­ly unex­pect­ed", because returnees expect famil­iar­i­ty. That return can be at least as tax­ing as the out­ward move is broad­ly doc­u­ment­ed in the lit­er­a­ture (e.g. Harz­ing 1995: "return­ing home pos­es even larg­er prob­lems than the for­eign assign­ment itself").

[8] Game Devel­op­er, ¹⁰⁄₁₁ June 2026: "Ubisoft clos­ing Win­nipeg and Bel­grade stu­dios and mak­ing fur­ther lay­offs". gamedeveloper.com. Ver­i­fied and con­firmed across sev­er­al out­lets (includ­ing PC Gamer, Engad­get, PocketGamer.biz): clo­sure of the Win­nipeg (around 65 staff) and Bel­grade (around 100) stu­dios; 51 lay­offs in Barcelona as the site is refo­cused on the Rain­bow Six line; fur­ther cuts in San Fran­cis­co and across glob­al pub­lish­ing; up to 380 posi­tions affect­ed in all; the com­pa­ny's sixth round of lay­offs in 2026; part of a sav­ings pro­gramme of rough­ly 500 mil­lion euros.

[9] Fil­ip­ič Ster­le, M., Fontaine, J. R. J., De Mol, J., & Ver­hof­s­tadt, L. L. (2018), Expa­tri­ate Fam­i­ly Adjust­ment: An Overview of Empir­i­cal Evi­dence on Chal­lenges and Resources. Fron­tiers in Psy­chol­o­gy, 9, 1207. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01207. Review arti­cle; reports among oth­ers Lazaro­va et al. (2015), for whom the accom­pa­ny­ing part­ner's career con­cerns, resis­tance to the move, and rela­tion­ship crises are among the most fre­quent­ly report­ed rea­sons for the fail­ure of for­eign assign­ments. (To be dis­tin­guished from the lev­el of the fail­ure rate, cf. [5]: the myth con­cerns the mag­ni­tude, not the rea­sons giv­en.)

[10] Biel­by, W. T., & Biel­by, D. D. (1992), I Will Fol­low Him: Fam­i­ly Ties, Gen­der-Role Beliefs, and Reluc­tance to Relo­cate for a Bet­ter Job. Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Soci­ol­o­gy, 97(5), 1241-1267. doi:10.1086/229901. Evi­dence for the mech­a­nism: mobil­i­ty large­ly fol­lows the man's career, and the accom­pa­ny­ing role is large­ly car­ried by women. Quan­ti­ta­tive sup­port: stan­dard mobil­i­ty sur­veys con­sis­tent­ly put the share of women among inter­na­tion­al assignees at rough­ly 20 to 25 per­cent (includ­ing the World­wide Sur­vey of Inter­na­tion­al Assign­ment Poli­cies and Prac­tices; RES Forum), so the accom­pa­ny­ing part­ner is pre­dom­i­nant­ly female.