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.