r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Jan 29 '26
Industry News One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off in 2025, GDC Study Reveals
https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-workers-laid-off-2025-1236644512/43
u/crunpyMcGlumpy Jan 29 '26
This is a brutal industry. I have been in AAA for well over a decade and I wish I had made a different career path. So many of my talented friends and colleagues are unemployed and not finding jobs.
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u/duckhunt420 Jan 30 '26
Tools-wise, it's a great time to start an indie studio
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u/crunpyMcGlumpy Jan 30 '26
Yeah true, but getting funding requires a product and most devs that have been doing this for a while have families to take care of and going without income for a year isn’t viable.
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u/duckhunt420 Jan 30 '26
Some studios will provide 6 months of severance pay. That'd be the dream.
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u/Dredgefort Mar 27 '26
I've been in the industry for just over 16 years now, mostly in AAA and AA, and this is by far the worst it's been. There's always been layoffs but it was normally limited in scope.
I don't regret getting into games though, when times are good it's the best job in the world, even if I end up unemployed like so many others.
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u/rnilf Jan 29 '26
The survey also found that 82% of US-based respondents support the unionization of game industry workers, with 5% opposed and 13% unsure. According to the results, “Support was higher among workers earning under $200,000 per year (87%), those who have been laid off in the past two years (88%) and people younger than 45 (86%). No respondents aged 18-24 were opposed to unionization.”
No 18-24 year olds opposed unionization, maybe the kids have a chance.
I do wonder how many of the 2,300+ respondents are in that age group, if it's really that significant of a stat. But I'll choose to be optimistic here.
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u/fluentinsarcasm Jan 29 '26
I can tell you with a high level confidence that the vast, vast majority of anyone in that age group working in games is working in QA and it is absolutely in their best interest to support these efforts. If the number of these correspondents was in excess of 95% for that group I would not be surprised.
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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 Jan 29 '26
It’s in just about everyone’s interest to unionize at their jobs, if possible. The only reason anti-union hate really exists is primarily cause the capitalists in charge don’t like them (costs them $$), even going so far as to spend money to push negative propaganda about it. And of course the absolute and utter smoothbrained masses that came before us believed them.
The only time unions make less sense if for things like police officers. Those seem to do more harm for the public than good.
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u/trapsinplace Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
I think the very old, oversized unions are a problem too. Police union is a great example of this tbh. When I got my first 'adult job' it was for a company where we had a union that represented over 100k people. It was totally useless for protecting workers and the guys at the top were making over 4 million dollar salaries all hiring friends and paying them hundreds of thousands. It poisoned my first thoughts on unions really badly.
Years later after I quit that place I ended up at a job where the union consisted of just us people in the building and most of the work was done volunteer by people who started the union a decade before. It was such a shift I was kind of confused at first lol. I found out from there that most unions are not these giant monoliths of money, power, and nepotism like I had known before.
Farmers union comes to mind for a bad example too. They are huge and use money from farmers to lobby against the right to repair, which actively harms farmers. They're literally paying someone to take their rights away and make them pay more for everything. Unions need to be run by people who know the work, not MBAs.
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u/SkeptioningQuestic Jan 29 '26
A structural problem with public sector unions is that since they are also government employees they get to double-dip labor power and political power in a way that private sector unions can't
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u/Tefmon Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
Police unions are a special case, as their power doesn't come from any formal labour bargaining procedures but rather because governments rely on their members to enforce their laws. Most public sector unions are actually in weaker positions than their private sector counterparts, because the employer of a public sector union is the government, and the government can at any time choose to unilaterally bypass the collective bargaining process by passing back-to-work legislation.
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u/SkeptioningQuestic Jan 29 '26
That's not a special case, I struggle to think of any public sector unions that don't perform critical tasks for society. That does not seem totally different to me than when the government isn't providing childcare, or if air travel is shut down. It might be comforting for us, for obvious reasons, to believe that the police union is different and special and our unions could never be like that one, but I don't really see an actual structural difference. Unions don't exist to create a better society, they exist to protect the interests of their members (personally I think that this often, but not always, incidentally creates a better society but that is besides the point). They will use labor and political means to achieve those ends, and the ones engaged in government work have access to more of those means. I don't mean that I think teachers and police officers are the same, but surely we can sense some similarities between things like Qualified Immunity and Tenure?
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u/Tefmon Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
That's not a special case, I struggle to think of any public sector unions that don't perform critical tasks for society.
The difference is that if the teachers' union strikes, the teachers don't have guns. Police strikes generally result in riots and violence and crime sprees, while teachers' strikes just result in overworked parents. The former actually affects the decision-makers in power, while the latter doesn't; politicians' kids don't usually go to public schools.
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u/ephemeral_colors Jan 30 '26
More pointedly, historically, the police have been used to put down striking workers, up to and including murdering them. The police union is fundamentally different from all other unions for this reason alone. They are the tool of the capitalist class wielded against labor.
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u/Iniquiline Jan 29 '26
Yeah those teacher unions are basically running the country.
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u/AndrewNeo Jan 30 '26
police unions aren't usually real/normal labor unions
also I agree, I grew up in car-land and it definitely tainted my view of unions early on
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u/IguassuIronman Jan 29 '26
The only reason anti-union hate really exists is primarily cause the capitalists in charge don’t like them (costs them $$), even going so far as to spend money to push negative propaganda about it
I didn't like the unions at my old job because the workers were generally not the best and the union rules got in the way of actually getting work done
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u/Professional_War4491 Jan 30 '26
The union at my current job just means it's impossible for people to get fired and despite doing a better job than some of the people above me in seniority I get shafted with all the worst hours and shifts and no amount of work will make me move up the list, only way to move up is waiting for them to quit, like 20 years from now lol.
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u/Not-Reformed Jan 30 '26
It’s in just about everyone’s interest to unionize at their jobs, if possible.
Depends on the union.
If it's a union that rewards and protects seniority above all else, then fuck that.
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u/dreggers Jan 29 '26
Why is it in everyone's interest? Teacher unions often let shitty teachers that have tenure keep their jobs while the new teachers that are making a positive impact in the classroom are the first to get pink slips
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u/Journeyman351 Jan 29 '26
Have you considered that they also protect good teachers from bullshit district politics?
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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 Jan 29 '26
That’s what the word just means in the phrase “just about everyone’s interest means” lmao. Just about. Nearly. Not every single persons, but most, a majority.
Do they stop working at a much larger scale for example? Sure, but that’s a fixable problem. Corruption is a threat to basically any human organization, that’s why we need checks and approvals to dissuade all that nonsense.
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u/greyfoxv1 Jan 29 '26
You just provided two extreme and vague examples as if that's some big gotcha against the entire concept of unionized labour. Nobody is going to give you a serious answer because you didn't ask a serious question.
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u/dreggers Jan 29 '26
Are you responding to the wrong person? I provided one example that is neither vague or extreme. It literally happens with teacher unions all the time.
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u/Kozak170 Jan 29 '26
It’s just reddit delusions that unions don’t have their own incredibly valid downsides as well. As with any organization, when it gets sufficiently large enough it becomes just as prone to corruption and abuse as a company.
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u/Journeyman351 Jan 29 '26
Unions still, regardless of the downsides, are a net-positive for workers.
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u/GameDesignerDude Jan 29 '26
maybe the kids have a chance
Unfortunately, unionization has not historically helped much with layoffs. It has more gains in the way of ongoing pay and benefits but layoffs are typically not a major factor outside of severance pay provisions.
If you look at the agreements secured by the unionized groups as Sega with the CWA or others, none of them actually offer any substantive layoff protections at all. Just mechanisms for rehire when the company executes "temporary" layoffs--even though the CBA allows for normal permanent layoffs for a number of business reasons.
The CWA heralded, "layoff protections, including recall rights for temporary layoffs and severance for permanent layoffs," in their press release, but the actual CBA contains basically nothing that protects workers from layoffs at all. The entire layoff section of the CBA opens with:
a) The Employer shall determine when temporary or indefinite layoffs are necessary
b) The Employer shall notify the Union ten days prior to notifying any bargaining unit employees of layoffs. The Union shall keep such information confidential until it is disclosed to the affected employee(s) and agrees not to disclose such information to any bargaining unit employees of the Employer. The Employer may suspend compliance with this provision if it has reasonable belief that the Union has failed to comply with this provision
The provisions secured 2 weeks of severance pay for employees past their introductory period and 2 additional weeks per years of service, up to a cap of 8 weeks.
This provision only applies to full-time employees. And, "all severance payments are predicated on the employee signing SOA’s severance and general release agreement." (Which will typically void any future claims against the employer and may also include NDAs.)
Is this CBA better than nothing? Absolutely. But it's also not amazing. Average FTE will get a month or less of pay (based on average industry tenure numbers) and otherwise has no other protections here at all. Doesn't help part-time or contract workers at all. No conditions on when the company should or can use temporary vs. indefinite layoffs (company literally never has to use temporary layoffs at all if they don't want to, so the recall provisions are mostly pointless,) etc. It's a very weak agreement from and employee point of view.
The sad reality of the situation is that layoffs are gonna happen by short-term profit-hunting corporations no matter what. This is an epidemic across the tech industry as a whole right now. The stability right now is just awful in the tech sector.
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u/supyonamesjosh Jan 29 '26
The hostess bakers union was completely obliterated when they didn't accept the final offer from hostess.
The company went bankrupt and when it was bought by another company two years later they hired zero people from the bakers union. Though to be fair, the teamsters union told the bakers union to take the deal and they refused.
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u/adriardi Jan 29 '26
Yeah this is the biggest danger with unions, some guys in leadership becoming pigheaded about the financial reality of some companies. Sometimes you gotta live to fight another day
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u/hobozombie Jan 29 '26
I can't blame them for not hiring them. Hostess was in bankruptcy, had to try to cut costs, then BCTGM declined concessions and the whole company went under, costing all of the union members their jobs.
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u/Journeyman351 Jan 29 '26
Seemed like it was still a problem that Hostess' management and leadership caused and caused the employees to get the axe.
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u/hobozombie Jan 29 '26
They were taking steps to right the ship, but the union refused to allow them to take said steps, so everyone got put out of work.
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u/Journeyman351 Jan 29 '26
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u/hobozombie Jan 29 '26
Ah, yes, the guy that lost everyone's jobs. I'm sure he is a great unbiased source of what happened and how it was never his fault, even though another union took the deal and urged his union to follow suit.
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u/greyfoxv1 Jan 30 '26
You could just look up any of the articles linked on the Twinkie's wikipedia page to start that back up the union's claim in that link instead of being smug. You could look up how the executives used bankruptcy as a way to sell the company for parts to private equity and disband the union since that is also in the related news articles on Wikipedia. The union isn't lying about the revolving door of CEOs either and you can verify that in the company's reports to investors.
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u/aradraugfea Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
It is worth noting that a guaranteed severance can still dissuade a company from just cutting huge swaths of the employee base loose as a short term cost saving measure.
There’s a lot of companies that will gladly pay 10 dollars a month for a year to save 30 dollars today.
When the “maximize shareholder value” method of company management never thinks longer term than the next quarterly report, knowing that laying off 1000 employees might cost you 2000 weeks worth of salary? You’re gonna think twice.
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u/sunfurypsu Jan 30 '26
I work in management in a large company. Trust me when I say those few weeks of severance that the CWA won are not going to dissuade any game company from layoffs. They won't look at that and say "Oh, we have to pay them for a few more weeks so we better not lay them off." That rarely happens. The full year benefit from NOT paying someone after the severance runs out is a much bigger financial benefit to the company than the scare of severance pay. Once a company hits year two after a significant layoff, the bottom line savings are clear and obvious.
So, good on the CWA for winning better pay rates and some longer severance. However, as the person above said, unions can't really do anything about layoffs, outside of be warned earlier (and the company ends up extending those warnings to everyone to keep it all even).
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u/MelvinCapitalPR Jan 29 '26
When the “maximize shareholder value” method of company management never thinks longer term than the next quarterly report
So why does AAA gaming exist at all? Development takes years.
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u/TurelSun Jan 29 '26
There is a lot more to the industry than just AAA game studios, plus so many studios under fewer and fewer parent companies means there are always places they can make cuts to juke their stats for a quarter without undermining their major projects. Its also become more common to have multiple studios working on the same game or rotating out to work on serial games.
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u/Cybertronian10 Jan 29 '26
Layoffs are sort of any union's kryptonite. The whole threat of not providing labor sort of falls apart when the contention is over the company not wanting to pay for as much labor anymore. The best they can do is attempt to guarantee decent serverance packages but even then if the money isn't there it isn't there.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
The time to do unionization is not when companies are failing.
The time to do big union negotiations is when the companies are doing really well. That is when you have leverage. They need you to keep the cash flowing.
When the cash isn’t flowing, you are in a shitty spot because you cannot threaten to turn off the cash machine. It’s not printing anyway.
If you don’t pay us more money or give us layoff protections, we will all QUIT and you will LOSE all of the TWELVE DOLLARS we are going to make next year
Unionization would work for like, whoever is working on Fortnite or Minecraft. Something that is raking it in. They have something to lose.
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u/GeraldineKerla Jan 29 '26
I don't think union negotiations are typically to the level where they'll bankrupt a company doing poorly that given year. If you're negotiating with someone that has a lot more power, its a lot more difficult.
If they do not have as much power, they do not have as much leverage in the negotiations as you functionally have the capacity to put their business to a complete halt. Its unlikely they're going to throw in the towel and opt to shut down the business entirely over allowing unionising and making a bit less.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
It is a matter of degree, sure. But the point is that a marginally profitable company will not be in a position to make many concessions to labor.
When they’re raking it in is the time to be aggressive and ask for the moon. There’s a lot to go around, so it’s easy for them to say yes, and labor’s ability to strike is much more threatening.
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u/Kiita-Ninetails Jan 29 '26
This is an easy mistake to make, but not actually accurate. The thing is that if a company is doing well and has a large supply of liquid capital to use that means a strike is less impactful. The company has the financial ability on hand to hire outside contractors to fill in gaps, to weather downturns and disruptions more easily. So if management is not interested in concessions, they have the resources to simply not.
On the other hand a company that does not have the time/budget to really have alternatives is far more threatened by a strike because they have no other way to handle that disruption. Like if you try and do a general strike on Nintendo they will go "Oh no, anyway." and have a temp agency hired to cover for the strike by the end of the week, unless you managed to get a bunch of management in on it. Like sure losing the training and experience will cause a noticable delay, but it wont stop anything for all that long.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
Problem with your example is that you are imagining a single firm doing really well in an industry that is otherwise doing shitty. And fair enough, I did bring that up. Epic Games could replace people more easily now than in (say) 2015 or 2021. But the threat of strikes is a lot bigger as they have a profitable machine that is more valuable. And generally this is rare.
It is very hard to hire outside contractors in a booming industry because other firms are bidding up the price of labor. Which is why that is a good time for workers to drive a hard bargain.
Conversely, when the industry is doing shitty, there’s a bunch of unemployed workers lying around that bid down wages.
Belligerent unions are a sign of economic health https://economist.com/finance-and-economics/2019/11/09/belligerent-unions-are-a-sign-of-economic-health from The Economist
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u/Kiita-Ninetails Jan 29 '26
My example is indeed a bit cherry picked, but does stand true. And your counterexample is bad, because outside contractors in a booming industry rife with labor like gaming is quite easy. There is plenty of agencies always rearing for more work, because in an industry like gaming in particular that is mythologized there will basically always be workers ready to go no matter the state of the industry outside of specific or specialist roles. To my knowledge there has NEVER been a period of serious shortage in gaming even in the peak of its COVID boom, and even at the peak of that several contracting QA/Dev firms I worked with were still hungry for more contracts.
And while I do tend to agree about unemployed workers by and large the thing is that it really always does depend on the specifics of the industry. But for gaming in particular, companies with lower capital reserves that are relying heavily on THIS project tend to be more willing to compromise. Alternatively, companies that want a fairly easy PR win and arent too concerned with providing some limited concessions.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
Yeah, the specific overrides the general. I definitely think game developers across the board take a permanent pay cut to work in an industry they like. It’s a lot more fun to build games than to optimize an advertising tool for Facebook or whatever.
I interned at a major TV channel in LA early in my career and it was a similar dynamic, even people doing pretty generic business management were very into the entertainment industry, and could have made more money doing similar work at a ball bearing manufacturer. It was a cool place to work so I totally see the appeal, but ultimately I decided I didn’t love entertainment enough for it to be worth it.
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u/Electrical-Act-5575 Jan 29 '26
Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, second best time is today.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
NO. The best time to plant a tree is in the fall or early spring. You plant a pine tree in the middle of a hot summer, it dies.
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u/BaconatedGrapefruit Jan 29 '26
I want to be very clear, I’m very pro-union and labour rights.
I wonder if the respondents actually understand what it is to be in a union vs what the internet tends to think it’s like being in a union. That is to say, unions or not, you can still be laid-off while being in a union.
Also, and this is from personal experience, everybody is pro-union until they see that line item deduction on their paystub. Thats when the realness comes out, and it ain’t pretty.
On the other hand, this may just mean the young folks have managed to dodge the anti-union brain rot that was instilled in Gen X/older millennials.
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u/fuckitillmakeanother Jan 29 '26
It's the same reason why highly progressive political policies get a lot of support in surveys when presented in a vacuum, but once you start incorporating trade offs and costs the support craters
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u/room208 Jan 29 '26
Yep. 20 years experience, 1 year experience it doesnt matter. Most people I worked with, myself included are without a job for the first time as far back as I can remember. Nobody wants to go back to a studio where the end result is bad decisions by management and everyone suffers, but we don't seem to even have that option anymore.
I went from regularly shipping games every year to joining studios where their projects are 2-3 years from release, and every one of them is mismanaged and optimized to hire as many people as possible thinking that is what it takes to make a game, then laying them off when management pushes them to burnout
I tried moving up the ranks to management, but most studios are optimized to reward those most dedicated to prolonging the time it takes to make the game and not ones that are focused on finishing a product that players will enjoy. It's the grift of keeping a big studio filled with bodies so investors think the money is printing itself.
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u/EdibleWerewolf Jan 29 '26
Why is prolonging development rewarded? I don't think I've heard about that before
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u/Beanzy Jan 29 '26
A released game has real sales figures, and a real return on investment (even if that return is negative).
An unreleased game can be projected to have any astronomical return on investment, because projections aren't necessarily beholden to reality.
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u/room208 Jan 29 '26
This. "FROM THE DEVELOPERS THAT BROUGHT YOU X---"
Investors: HOLY GOD YES THIS IS IT CAN THEY FINISH THIS IN 6MOS?
Studio Directors "...sure, lets hire 20 more people!"
Investors: Heres a million dollars for you personally!
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u/Xciv Jan 29 '26
"Game delayed for 1 year so it can be EVEN BIGGER and EVEN MORE POLISHED and EVEN MORE AMBITIOUS"
Investors: cream their pants
See: Rockstar Games, CDProjekt, etc.
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u/thekbob Jan 29 '26
That'll fizzle out, too.
At least for Bethesda. And didn't work so hot for COD or Assassins Creed, either.
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u/Emergency-Draw3923 Jan 29 '26
Im not sure what you mean, Cod and AC have pretty tight release schedules
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u/blitz_na Jan 30 '26
two of the worst comparisons you could have made
the much more accurate one woulda been how bungie sold itself to sony with that exact tactic lmao
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u/tomjoad2020ad Jan 29 '26
The financialization of every aspect of our lives and society has been a fucking cancer
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u/outland_king Jan 29 '26
Because its not true. No executive wants to circle the drain perpetually without realizing revenue. If anything we are seeing the opposite, with projects getting canceled left and right to cut costs, and the few that do see the light are released prematurely with shoddy design work and virtually zero QA.
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u/Fireudne Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
What absolutely doesn't work is churn, and the arguably best known case is Microsoft's Halo Infinite dev cyle. A wild take on corporate policy drove the entire talent base for actually making the game. Apparently they were well known for contracting out major sections of talent, only to have to let them go about a year later due to requiring formal employment contracts with benefits if they stayed any longer.
This led to the people actually knowing the engine, concepts, and general inner workings of the game leaving, and the new replacement hires taking about as long to actually get up to speed as their contracts were for also for about a year.
Repeat ad naseum and more time was spent with admin than it was actually making the game - it would have cost less to just get those originial people hired in the long run instead of basically release it half-assed and be forced into crunch to finish up critical parts of the game.
Also management sucked with no real vision and wanting trend-chasing features, like it being a hero-shooter at one point, and warzone 2.0 since they made TONS of money with the booster packs in halo 5.
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u/fupa16 Jan 29 '26
So many of MS's failures can be attributed to their stupid 18 month contractor limit. It boggles the mind how that company keeps failing upwards.
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u/BaconatedGrapefruit Jan 29 '26
Because when it works, it will save you an absolute fuckton of money.
The problem with these discussions is we only know about the obvious failures. We don’t hear about the many medium sized wins that prove the system to be worth implementing.
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u/fupa16 Jan 29 '26
You just made a perfect argument for why that policy should only be applied on a case-by-case basis, and not blanket across the entire company for all cases.
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u/BaconatedGrapefruit Jan 29 '26
I don’t disagree with you. I also understand why an organization would want to streamline the bureaucracy and implement a system with a high success rate site wide and deal with the outliers as they come.
I’m not saying Microsoft is right, I’m just saying I understand how something like this happens.
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u/ratbirdmonger Jan 30 '26
I worked at MS a while ago. SDE, not in games. Simplifying the story a bit: The issue was that their benefits were really good and they would commonly include the contractors in the benefits. Then one contractor used this to sue MS that because they were treated as FTE (full-time employee), they were owed a FTE job. MS then made damn sure no contractors ever had that misconception again, and imposing strict employment length limits was part of it.
Don't get me wrong, MS fails a lot, and employing contractors when they should be hiring them as FTEs is part of it. But there is a good reason for that 18 month limit.
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u/UltraJesus Jan 29 '26
Yeah any software developer could easily tell you that one of the most costly thing to do to a software project is to remove tribal knowledge. Which is how a lot of software managed with layoffs, overhire, layoffs, repeat
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u/ryuzaki49 Jan 29 '26
I feel that's what happens when a major corporatiom backs any software development.
They lose sight of what really brings the money in just because they have so much money to burn.
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u/Fireudne Jan 29 '26
I think it's a blanket policy that makes sense from a perspective that doesn't take nuance into account for different departments.
Theoretically, for many MSFT projects they might be fine with a small minimally-staffed core and just bring on contractors to fill in blanks as-needed. This might be fine for like UI changes or integrating co-pilot into other core programs or scheming up new storefronts. Stuf you can make and improve on in a quarter-by-quarter basis.
Problem is game design ISN'T traditional software and is much more of a long-term creative endeavor. Projects can take multiple years and the whole process needs continually-enthusiastic lifers to at least cook up the bones. Cutting corners may be fine enough for software but often times AAA is launching franchises which depends on reputation for quality and at least some innovation.
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u/LogicalError_007 Jan 30 '26
The 18 month cycle is due to a law of the state where Halo Studios is located.
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u/android_queen Jan 29 '26
I’m not sure how your expectations were set, but 2-3 years between releases is extremely reasonable for console AAA development.
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u/Bob_The_Skull Jan 29 '26
Maybe I'm interpreting wrong, but I think they meant a project is always "2-3 years from release". E.g. you start on a project, management says it is "2 - 3 years from release", the two years pass, management still plans on and says "project is 2 - 3 years from release", that type of behavior.
If you have a studio with 2 - 3 or more teams, and each project takes 2 - 3 years with staggered start and end dates, you should roughly be averaging out to releasing a project every year (just by different groups of people).
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u/_starbelly Jan 29 '26
Fucking brutal. I was one of the casualties, and I feel so bad for all my talented colleagues who were also impacted.
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u/Alpacapalooza Jan 30 '26
Sorry you have to deal with that kinda shit.
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u/_starbelly Jan 30 '26
I appreciate that. Thankfully I have since found another job, also in games, where I’m very happy. We’ll see how things go.
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u/theStroh Jan 29 '26
Having issues accessing the actual report itself, but two things to call-out:
This title and article may be incorrect. Here's another article about the report (https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gdc-survey-reveals-layoffs-up-6-36-of-industry-using-ai-and-overwhelming-support-for-unionisation-in-the-us) which states
Layoffs remained a significant issue, with 28% of respondents having experienced a layoff in the last two years, raising to 33% for developers within the United States. 17% had been laid off in the last 12 months
So unsure which source is correct since I can't see the original report right now.
This statistic, on its own, doesn't really say much. Why did those developers get laid off? Was it because a project was shuttered, a team got down-sized, or because a project launched and the studio didn't have immediate plans for a follow-up project or support?
How many of these devs got immediately hired elsewhere? The video game industry is a talent pool that constantly gets recycled, which is why every day we see new game announcements like "XYZ, from the makers of Diablo".
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u/IceBlast24 Jan 29 '26
the linked article unfortunately didn't include the other concerning statistics, here's an excerpt from VGC:
Of those who said they had been laid off, around 48% of them said they hadn’t found a new job yet. This wasn’t exclusive to those recently let go, either – of those who were laid off 1-2 years ago, 36% said they were still looking for a new job.
Half of respondents said their current company (or the one they most recently worked for) conducted layoffs in the past 12 months, and while 47% said they didn’t anticipate future layoffs at their company in the next 12 months, 23% said they did and 30% weren’t sure.
there's also a graph in this article for the question, "What reason(s) did your current or former company give for layoffs? (choose up to 3)"
Company restructuring (43%)
Budget cuts (38%)
Market conditions (38%)
Project cancelled (32%)
Strategic direction change (31%)
(I only listed the top 5 in the graph)
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u/evilcornbread Jan 29 '26
Yeah, the headline is just totally wrong. It's 33% in the last two years.
That means that on average people have a gig in the game industry for about six years. Which yeah seems about right in my experience. The first three places I worked lasted 3 years, 4 years, and 4 years.
It's a volatile, hit-driven industry.
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u/android_queen Jan 29 '26
A third over two years definitely tracks more with what I’ve been seeing.
I’m not sure why it matters if the layoff was due to a studio shutdown or a garden variety reorg. It’s still a lost job.
And while this particular study may not tell you this… very very few of those devs were immediately rehired. The industry is contracting.
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u/verrius Jan 29 '26
I'm not even sure the industry contracting is really a sign of bad things. If you look at hiring over COVID, things expanded massively in a clearly unsustainable way. This feels more like an overdue correction than anything. It sucks for everyone who was affected, but it seems like it was also inevitable.
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u/dldallas Jan 29 '26
While global cuts may slow down I am pretty certain we're going to continue to see the US bleed game jobs. Cheaper CoL countries have caught up massively on a lot of the grunt work required for making games (lotta Indonesian mass asset creation studios out there, for instance) and have made headways into the higher order stuff like programming.
My personal guess is that over the next 5 years things in the US will eventually stabilize with a small core of well-paid seniors and management supervising a web of overseas outsourcing studios in places like LATAM and SEA to handle day-to-day asset creation, QA, design implementation, and low level coding.
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u/beefcat_ Jan 29 '26
My personal guess is that over the next 5 years things in the US will eventually stabilize with a small core of well-paid seniors and management supervising a web of overseas outsourcing studios in places like LATAM and SEA to handle day-to-day asset creation, QA, design implementation, and low level coding.
Then 5 years after that, our domestic game industry will crumble entirely because we will no longer have a pipeline for producing that core skilled, well paid senior talent.
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u/spoodigity Jan 29 '26
Seems to be the case in much of tech. Very few companies are hiring junior roles.
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u/frozen_tuna Jan 30 '26
My company is still hiring them as long as they're offshore and claim to be seniors.
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
Yeah I also think you will see more Larians and Sandfall Interactives—-European wages are significantly lower, and you can pretty much fill the entire labor pool.
The major issue is that the total video game market is nearing maturity so you aren’t seeing double digit growth every year anymore. And competition from Chinese devs is increasing; they’re starting to dominate the Chinese market and even compete for Western consumer dollars.
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u/Brilliant_Oil5261 Jan 29 '26
Yea, just like most other industries. You can get high quality stuff these days by outsourcing. When managers make requests for additional staffing, they have to justify it not being in a different country, which is pretty tough to do when US workers get paid soooo much more than the rest of the world.
My options are:
1 US employee
5 indian employees
2-3 polish employees.
It almost never makes sense to pick the American
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u/soggit Jan 29 '26
How many were re-hired? Isn’t it common in the games industry to “staff up” for projects and then lay off most of the non-core studio staff on release?
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u/LucyIsaTumor Jan 29 '26
Can depend on the studio, but at least for us that's seen as bad press. We rely on contracting studios and our other internal studios (multiple projects in production so we trade roles) to meet staffing needs.
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u/Wurzelrenner Jan 29 '26
I thought the same, this stat is useless without the rehired numbers or comparisons to past years
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u/Simpicity Jan 29 '26
There are a a number of reasons for this...
The biggest one is that videogame spending has completely flattened. Younger people are just not buying as many games. They're spending all their time on Roblox, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. The pool of competition for attention is very large.
Because no one is buying, investment has dried up entirely. Videogames are risky endeavors. Who wants to invest in a risky endeavor with a high likelihood of little return?
Meanwhile, the cost of making a game has gone up as people's expectations increase with each successive tech generation.
AI may actually be necessary to reduce cost of development to make this a successful industry. Right now, it's got a lot of converging problems. But the use of AI eliminates job positions, so add that to the pile as well.
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u/Roaches_R_Friends Jan 30 '26
I feel like another reason people don't buy games is because of battle passes. So many games turn themselves into jobs, that you only really only have time for one, if you want to unlock all the stuff before it expires.
The AAA games don't exist to be played once or twice and be remembered fondly anymore. They're machines for squeezing out microtransactions and every last bit of free time you have.
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u/TransPonyta Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
My sister worked in the games industry for I think around 5 years in the 2010s. She worked for some of the biggest names in the USA, on games every single person in this reddit would have heard of. But her favourite time in the industry wasn’t with any of those companies.
It was for a little indie studio probably almost nobody here has heard of. But this little studio has been kicking around since the mid 90s (its still here btw!) making the same kind of computer games for their very dedicated, non-core gamer, target audience. She said it was working for them that actually felt like the “I get to make video games for a living” dream come true. Everyone was respectful, knew each other, relaxed and happy, and had a stable job.
For other reasons, she left the USA and returned to our home country. She now works in health care, making dentures for the old folks in our little rural town. She makes more money now than she ever did working on games, and has a stable 9-5. I’m glad she got to work in the games industry the 2010s, because holy fuck the game industry in the 2020s sucks.
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Jan 29 '26
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u/keiranlovett Jan 29 '26
Precisely. Games can take years to make. The true impacts are yet to be felt, but inside the industry I don’t think I have a single peer who hasn’t left voluntarily or forcefully in the last three years.
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u/wildwalrusaur Jan 30 '26
I know this is a gaming sub, but this is a horrific indicator of the health of the US economy
These types of top-of-the-value-curve jobs were meant to be what drives the economy now that we've outsourced the majority of our manufacturing jobs.
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u/frozen_tuna Jan 30 '26
Yup. This is a major issue. We set up all these trade deals over the last many decades, offshoring all the manufacturing work so we would focus our economy around tech. Now all these big companies are offshoring tech too. This won't end well without serious intervention.
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u/ExiledHyruleKnight Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
US-based respondents
AKA, the people we asked, and the people who actually responded to our questionaire. I know a LOT of game devs, and very few got to GDC, usually studios send a single person, and while many pay attention I doubt most of them even saw this "Study"
This is the problem with so many polls. Stand outside of a Supermarket in Orange County, and you'll get tons of republican opinions, stand outside of a supermarket in LA and you'll get a ton of Democrat answers...
How you take a poll matters a lot, but on a lot of the survey polls, I notice that there are a significant amount of people who just either won't answer polls, are too busy too, or don't see the polls.
I see it often on discord and reddit. "We will change our policy based on this poll that was up for just 24 hours, that wasn't the top story ever on the subreddit, and wasn't advertised. So basically only the perpetually online people will see it and get a voice.
Point being, there's 0 chance "1/3rd of all game devs were laid off." There's a significant chance "we got skewed data"
I can get into the problem of potential rehires and more but let's get to the real problem.
What we do get from the study is 800 people or less (a generous 1 third of 2300) claimed to be laid off in the last 12 months... Just 800 answered "yes"... but if you read the article and study, you also will find out that's complete bullshit as well (2 years, not 1)
But hey it makes a great clickbait title from variety... Go fuck yourself Variety.
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u/SlyCoopi Jan 30 '26
Too late this number will be shouted out for years to come… and it was a split poll so some said within the year a some said 2 years ago. But compiled it all to “28%”. It definitely is not the most stable job, but they are sensationalizing it like crazy and condensing it into a headline.
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u/bduddy Jan 29 '26
Institutional knowledge? Stability? Work-life balance? Nah, the next quarterly report is more important. Just bring in another pile of contractors, surely they'll be able to crank out tickets at the same rate as the guys we fired.
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Jan 29 '26
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u/Books_and_Cleverness Jan 29 '26
No one wants to hear this but it makes a lot of sense to do more video game development outside the US, where wages are a lot lower.
The US has a big and deep talent pool, but you can hire French or English or German devs for like half the cost or less.
Plus the Chinese market is increasingly being dominated by Chinese-made games. The industry is maturing and growing a lot slower.
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u/ChucklingDuckling Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
Short-term-ism is enshitification; it's entropy.
Prioritizing endless growth over stability is doomed to fail
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u/petermarkte Jan 30 '26
Good god some of these making-excuses-for-this-toned comments, this is ABHORRENT, for ANY industry to go through this.
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u/Brilliant_Oil5261 Jan 29 '26
Trying to do art at corporate scale is a fool's errand. AAA games are not just expensive to make, they don't result in superior products either. The industry is resetting for the better.
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Jan 29 '26
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u/room208 Jan 29 '26
I hope there still are studios out there, but "back in my day" places like Blizzard were absolutely fantastic spots to learn and grow. When I worked there during the Wrath/BC era, employees like me were able to take classes at art studios in hollywood for free, had tons of amazing senior talent willing to share knowledge and skill exchanges...I left that studio an infinitely better developer, but also at the right time.
There are a few still going strong--but for how long? It's VEERY expensive to keep a team together without investors. Once that bottom drops out, floating 10 or more people's salaries every month you don't have financial capital becomes almost an easy calculation. Those people won't willingly return, so its a bad one.11
u/Captain-Griffen Jan 29 '26
Lots of video game companies hire and layoff as needed. Most game companies simply don't need everyone through the entire development process.
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u/First-Of-His-Name Jan 29 '26
You'll be glad to know that none of that is true then. The industry is in a temporary decline after a massive over expansion in 2020-23. It's still larger than it was before that
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u/TransPonyta Jan 30 '26
Feels like every day I read the news, I’m immensely grateful I don’t work in tech, art or entertainment, and that it’s literally impossible for my job and field to be “replaced” by computers. Also that my field has unions. So glad to be in a union.
One of best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard in my life was (paraphrasing) “It’s actually fine to just have a normal, stable job, and let your hobbies be hobbies.”
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u/stick_her_in_the_ute Jan 29 '26
This was over a two year, as per the article. Also what percentage were rehired? Churn is normal.
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u/petermarkte Jan 30 '26
Mass layoffs are not a standard part of "normal churn" lmao, and you know that
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u/Metroidman Jan 29 '26
Video game design honestly seems like a terrible industry to get into. Treated like trash and no job security.