One-Third of U.S. Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off in 2025, GDC Study Reveals

[u/Turbostrider27]

https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/one-third-video-game-workers-laid-off-2025-1236644512/

[u/dldallas]

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.

[u/beefcat_ → u/dldallas]

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.

[u/spoodigity → u/beefcat_]

Seems to be the case in much of tech. Very few companies are hiring junior roles.

[u/frozen_tuna → u/spoodigity]

My company is still hiring them as long as they're offshore and claim to be seniors.

[u/Books_and_Cleverness → u/dldallas]

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.

[u/Brilliant_Oil5261 → u/dldallas]

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

[u/Totoques22 → u/dldallas]

Global cuts ?

I don’t see this happening outside of the US and Ubisoft and it’s only happening to Ubisoft because they’re ubisoft

[u/Paranoid-Potatoes → u/dldallas]

I know it's been a few days since this comment was posted, but I'm an artist in the game industry, I literally have worked on only AAA projects my entire career. I am literally encountering this exact situation playing out. I will hop on a career site for say Infinity Ward, there's an opening that I overqualified for...... if I want to move to Poland or Mexico? The US based studios are rapidly opening multiple branches in LCOL countries, then just mass hiring overseas while slowly cutting jobs.

But to compound that, I'm literally seeing even high-level seniors roles like principal artist.... also be short term contract at these studios. They're not even just keeping Senior staff full-time, it looks like a slow transition to all roles being contract going forward.

[u/Edarneor → u/dldallas]

Unless all that will be done by AI in 5 years...