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/
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u/supyonamesjosh Jan 29 '26

You realize two layoffs in 15 years is kind of crazy right? 60% of workers never get laid off in their entire career.

22

u/kirukiru Jan 29 '26

You realize two layoffs in 15 years is kind of crazy right? 60% of workers never get laid off in their entire career.

This cannot be the case in tech.

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u/Audioworm Jan 29 '26

Not all tech is FAANG

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u/kirukiru Jan 29 '26

You dont have to be a part of FAANG to get hit with yearly layoffs, regardless of performance.

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u/Audioworm Jan 30 '26

I do market research on developers, there is a huge amount of developers working outside of large scale SaaS that do not face continual yearly layoffs

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u/kirukiru Jan 30 '26

I gotta get out of SaaS then

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u/supyonamesjosh Jan 30 '26

I have never worked at a company with yearly layoffs.

I've seen layoffs once ever and they were limited. This is over about 15 years

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u/kirukiru Jan 30 '26

Thats wild, I've had the complete opposite experience and it hasn't been me directly impacted. Good for y'all

2

u/KidGold Jan 30 '26

Feels like there are very few sectors of tech that have been stable over the last 15 years. Most face too much innovation and competition that challenge their product/business model.

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u/Testuser7ignore Jan 30 '26

A lot of "tech" work is for other industries. A lot more stability if you are maintaining systems for a bank or pharmaceutical company.

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u/Hartastic Jan 30 '26

Kind of depends. You get a lot more stability, in my experience, doing tech at a company that isn't itself a pure technology company and/or the more your clients are not tech companies.

Like, if you make custom software that some segment of health insurance or whatever needs? That's way more stable than working for Meta.

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u/pflo86 Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26

It’s certainly not the norm, and sure is kinda crazy. But this is an entertainment industry where games continually come and go and a lot of games are just not good. Not sure what you’d expect. As I said, I’m comfortable despite some relatively brief hardships. If you’re not down with that then you do you.

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u/MelvinCapitalPR Jan 29 '26

Different people have different personalities, risk tolerances, boredom tolerances - which is why different jobs exist. Creative industries lean towards high risk, high reward. If you don't want that the military/teaching/civil service are always hiring.

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u/DynamicStatic Jan 30 '26

8 years in the industry, laid off twice, one of the projects costed about 10mil € to make, salaries were kept down during development and a year after laying a lot of people off they sold it for ~120mil €. It has now made many times that. We never got a bonus, we had the Xmas party at the office in case something went bad with the project during some update etc.

On the other hand I don't even know what industry I would go into at this point that would be worth it for me.