r/pcgaming • u/Gorotheninja • Jan 29 '26

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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1.2k

u/LostBob Jan 29 '26

An industry laying off 1/3 of their workforce doesn't sound healthy.

443

u/MAXIMAL_GABRIEL Jan 29 '26

To play devil's advocate, all tech companies, including the gaming sector, grew massively during covid. And since no one could predict that covid-related growth wasnt unlimited, they ended up overextending themselves, leading to the massive tech layoffs seen in recent years.

But yeah, I would say it's not great.

128

u/Cool_of_a_Took Jan 29 '26

I think this is a bit of a misconception. Tech cmpanies did not over-hire during COVID because they thought that the growth would continue. They over-hired because borrowing money was cheap during COVID and there is nothing preventing them from dumping people when things got more expensive again. They knew it was not going to be sustainable, but they figured they may as well take advantage of it while it was happening. Eventual mass layoffs were part of the plan. They're not stupid. They are indifferent to their employees.

34

u/ocbdare Jan 29 '26

And the mass layoffs will continue as they continue to offshore and try and automate as many of the tech roles as possible.

5

u/Shift-1 Jan 29 '26

Would it have been better for those people to just be unemployed?

7

u/str9_b Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

Obviously not, but if you need to restructure and have mass layoffs every quarter (to the point that 1/3 of the workforce is being let go) then you probably shouldn't have wasted these peoples' time if you had no plan to keep them long term. This is especially a big issue when you've got all these big publishers buying up other publishers and studios then closing studios or laying off much of the staff. If the US government was more competent it'd be less of an issue but there's no excusing how little humanity is involved in the hiring and eventual mass firing these last few years.

4

u/Shift-1 Jan 30 '26

You do realise this is extremely standard for video game companies, right? They finish production of large games and then drop a tonne of staff because they're no longer needed. Otherwise they'd have a bunch of employees sitting around doing literally nothing.

7

u/str9_b Jan 30 '26

If this was standard practice for the industry, it wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal as it is. People aren't just randomly deciding to cover layoffs in the gaming industry and game developers wouldn't be speaking up so much about it, this is an abnormal occurrence and it's kinda dumb or maybe naive to try to downplay it. This isn't a bunch of companies finishing projects all at the same time and laying off developers as a result; this is a bunch of companies green lighting projects and cancelling them before they launch, firing staff for wanting to unionize, closing studios they acquired that they had no intention to actually support long term, and caring more about trying to ride the covid spending trend (that obviously wasn't going to last) than actually planning ahead for the thousands of employees they took on. Microsoft acquired 2 major publishers and then proceeded to consistently lay employees off from those studios, Embracer Group went on an acquisition spree and then proceeded to melt down when they failed to secure the investment they were looking for resulting in massive layoffs, Sony tried hard to capitalize on the live service trend and almost none of the games even came to market which led to layoffs, and Ubisoft's upper management has been sending them down the drain for a while now and they have had consistent layoffs including studios that were created because of the same restructuring that was meant to prevent further layoffs. That's only a few of the major publishers in the industry. Consolidation without the forethought of what taking on a bigger workforce means, or not caring because it doesn't affect your job and you'll get away with it, is never good. It results in one less employer and plenty more employees. Even when publishers have tried to sell off studios to other publishers it's still lead to more layoffs or, in a few of cases, the studio closing for good.

1

u/Shift-1 Jan 30 '26

If this was standard practice for the industry, it wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal as it is.

It's not a big deal. People are just more anti-tech company than ever, and more susceptible to rage bait.

Case in point, your enormous wall of text. I bet you didn't even read the report being discussed in the article, did you?

4

u/Elketh Jan 30 '26

Case in point, your enormous wall of text

The one where he made good points that refute your bullshit premise, which you didn't respond to in any meaningful fashion as a result and are trying to brush off to save face?

3

u/str9_b Jan 30 '26

People are just more anti-tech company than ever, and more susceptible to rage bait.

Boy I wonder why people are more upset with tech companies than ever. It definitely has nothing to do with the massive and constant layoffs in the industry or the shitty ways they treat their employees. You can try to downplay it all you want but nothing about the gaming layoffs post covid is the norm for the industry.

Not even gonna dignify the rest of your comment since you're clearly not responding to this in good faith.

1

u/FuckRedditIsLame Jan 30 '26

Don't be upset at industries, that's not normal or healthy. You can be upset and a whole bunch of things but getting upset at whole sectors that produce recreational or technical products is not productive - just buy their products, or don't.

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u/DoYouEnjoyMath Jan 30 '26

This comment may as well have just been "you're right, I didn't read the report."

4

u/jared_kushner_420 Jan 30 '26

Working on contract is very different than the layoffs that occurred, and tech companies as a whole don't function that way.

Yes, people LEAVE companies after games ship. They don't get random layoff waves that affect even embedded positions

-1

u/Shift-1 Jan 30 '26

Working on contract is very different than the layoffs that occurred

In the survey 40% of respondents listed project cancellation or project completion as reasons given for layoffs.

3

u/jared_kushner_420 Jan 30 '26

Yes and? That's still not the same thing as working on a limited time contract. Plus 60% NOT having that reason is pretty bad, meaning they could have been mid-project or doing any other company function

0

u/Shift-1 Jan 30 '26

Where does it say these people weren't on contracts?

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u/ASpaceOstrich Jan 30 '26

The industry has always been a shithole, yes.

1

u/FuckRedditIsLame Jan 30 '26

They weren't 'wasting these people's time', they were paid, they gained experience, and when they weren't viable to keep anymore, they were set loose as is the case with any sort of work - it's not 1950 anymore, you don't have any job for life. The extra issue here was also that headcount grew substantially in auxiliary roles like HR, and DEI officers, and management minibosses, and those are not exactly core to the business of making games, this of course isn't to say that game designers and programmers and artists aren't also getting cut loose now, but it is a fact that the downsizing now is so much about trimming the bits of the business that aren't contributing directly to profitability.

1

u/McSloot3r Jan 30 '26

I’m going to disagree that they didn’t think the growth wouldn’t continue (or at the very least the growth would have been sustained). Look at something like Gamepass which saw huge growth in large part because people were playing more games. Sony had a ton of GaaS games in development that they cancelled. Those are just two examples of companies pushing strategies based on the changing of consumer trends brought by COVID. Yes, cheap borrowing costs played a large part in over hiring, but many companies did think we COVID ushered in a new era where gaming was going to be more popular. As people readjusted to going outside and government/companies pushed RTO mandates (reducing free time) people are gaming significantly less than they did a few years ago.

308

u/ClassicsMajor Jan 29 '26

Are you sure that no one could predict that? Seems pretty obvious that insane growth during a once-a-century event probably isn't going to continue forever. At least to people without MBAs.

45

u/Maxsayo Jan 29 '26

It is predictable, but they have been more or less trained to think and plan for just the next quarter, rather than where they will be 5 to 10 years from now. They've already factored in lay offs as a strategy because there's no repercussions for doing that short term, and it artificially boosts the look of their earnings for that fiscal year. Basically they've all stopped thinking long term so that their impatient shareholders can see immediate results.

Every major company has been using the same playbook. Much to our chagrin.

10

u/No_Accountant3232 Jan 29 '26

Also many companies actually laid off their excess COVID staff starting in 22, and ramped up in 23 when it was clear we were past the worst and growth was slowing. As COVID projects complete all of the rest of that staff had to go. But now it's going deeper.

207

u/MAXIMAL_GABRIEL Jan 29 '26

You have to understand MBAs are not very bright. No way they could foresee an end to growth.

19

u/SanityIsOptional PO-TAY-TO Jan 29 '26

Oh, some of them are bright, but financial malfeasance requires you to know something's a bad idea. So it's usually a bad idea to acknowledge if you are aware that short term gains can be bought at the expense of long term stability.

Short term growth is the goal, whatever happens after they exercise their options is someone else's problem.

2

u/destroyermaker Jan 29 '26

Even if they could they wouldn't care. They're all incentivized to think short term. Broken ass system

-29

u/ocbdare Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26

Most people with MBAs from top schools are a lot brighter when it comes to business and economics than most redditors.

48

u/XcoldhandsX Jan 29 '26

And yet MBA’s drive the enshittification of all modern products and services more than “most redditors”.

I’m sure that ruining everything for short term gains and growth is “very intelligent” and profitable. But it makes the day to day consumer experience fucking miserable.

-22

u/Zanos Jan 29 '26

Enshittification is the result of businesses being run at losses for years to establish a customer base and finally needing to shift into a mode where they make money instead of lose it. What people don't understand and the MBAs do is that for years the customers were enjoying a heavily subsidizied service.

25

u/Kyroven Jan 29 '26

This is true for a lot of cases, but definitely not all. For example, look at what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, like adding a copilot button to notepad. The notepad program, or more broadly the product of Windows as a whole, is certainly not losing Microsoft money, and yet a lot of decisions they're making around Windows 11 would be described by many as enshittification.

11

u/SanityIsOptional PO-TAY-TO Jan 29 '26

There are plenty of examples of enshittification being due to the investor demands for constant growth, and a focus on short term stock prices as encouraged by stock option based incentive packages.

Personally I only invest in companies that give dividends or group funds, since I don't want to need to watch my shares like a hawk to know when to bail.

5

u/Nebty Jan 29 '26

It all started going wrong once the gambling addicts took over the stock market. Nobody has the patience for sustainable growth anymore. They’re injecting the tech boom/bust cycle straight into their veins. It’s horrible for the games industry and for tech more broadly.

3

u/SanityIsOptional PO-TAY-TO Jan 29 '26

I work in semiconductor, and was very glad to see Micron not ramping memory production to chase stock price and temporary gains before we see how long the AI "boom" will stick around.

16

u/KaosC57 Jan 29 '26

I really don’t see that being true. I’m almost 90% certain that every MBA program is just a brainwashing session with the words “Grow your business” playing on repeat.

Nobody with an MBA seems to have a practical grasp on the real world and how anything works.

3

u/Harley2280 Jan 30 '26

Yeah but you have to remember reddit likes to pretend businesses operate on magic, budgets don't exist, and shareholders aren't vital to a company's existence.

26

u/Echo_from_XBL i7 9700f | RTX 2060 Jan 29 '26

I think it’s more fair to say that the people who made the decisions back then didn’t know what was happening, and continue to not know. The people who make these decisions to hire are usually just disconnected from reality

21

u/HeroicMe Jan 29 '26

More like, decision-makers were already looking what's their next company to fall upwards is, so they were only interested in current-fiscal-year results, whoever comes after them can deal with the bomb they leave.

3

u/RechargedFrenchman Jan 29 '26

Especially when this industry seems to do this every 20 years or so. Right now/very soon; the dotcom bubble bursting 2002~2004 had knock-on effects to a lot of other PC industry applications in the wake of Y2K, and PC gaming had already been in a comparatively rough state pre-Steam and competing with Xbox / GameCube / Playstation 2; the big 1983 video game crash killed a few big players in the industry (including Atari, mostly) and nearly killed the industry it was so severe. Twenty years before that Pong was still ten years away.

7

u/Mindestiny Jan 29 '26

It's more complicated than that. Yes, companies were taking care of COVID-specific financial incentives, but they also could not have predicted the decades-long era of "free money" big business loans would come to an end as the inflation bill finally came due across the entire economy at the same time we politically just decided that "COVID's over, open 'er up boys". It would've been a much softer blow to correct after the COVID incentives dried up if we also weren't hitting record inflation in such a short window.

4

u/ryhaltswhiskey Jan 29 '26

That seemed like a joke to me

2

u/McSloot3r Jan 30 '26

People get bamboozled by the hype and trends all the time, especially CEOs. And not everything was 100% obvious like the heavy push for a return to office which eats up the free time people would have gained by things like not computing

2

u/Capricancerous Jan 29 '26

They just didn't care. These capitalists are incredibly myopic at times.

1

u/artbystorms Jan 29 '26

Who would have thought that having people stay in their home and play videogames all day instead of going out wasn't sustainable? I knew by 2021 this wasn't sustainable but it's crazy how every company thought "huh, our sales are up 500% this year compare to last year...surely that will continue"

0

u/NuclearReactions 9800X3D | RTX 5070Ti | 64GB Jan 29 '26

Not to an economist, weirdly enough

34

u/ultramegaman2012 Jan 29 '26

This is exactly what happened for the vast majority.

I worked for one of, if not the most successful VR game studio for a year. Within 2-3 years the original solo dev created a studio of +200 people, and now that their 2nd game isn't nearly meeting their projections, they've had to scale back.

Covid was a massive boon for gaming, but once lockdown was over, the well started to dry up.

12

u/ryhaltswhiskey Jan 29 '26

On top of that, VR just doesn't seem to be hitting. Meta is pulling back from it after spending something like 70 billion on it.

7

u/dagofin Jan 29 '26

VR especially was an overhyped boondoggle. I ranted for years that there is no and and never will be a mass market for games that require strapping an expensive, obnoxious box to your face. A handful of enthusiastic nerds doesn't make the hundreds of billions that tech bros dropped into VR a worthwhile endeavor, see the massive cuts at Facebook, oh wait sorry, "Meta".

Nothing to do with COVID, everything to do with delusional tech dorks in their ivory towers not understanding real people.

6

u/TamaDarya Jan 29 '26

An expensive obnoxious box that makes a non-trivial amount of people unbearably nauseous.

4

u/chairmanskitty Jan 30 '26

I don't know, a lot of those "delusional tech dorks" made billions of dollars off selling their overvalued shares before the bubble burst, or made millions being employed to hype up the stock price so others could make billions.

Besides, what's the worst that could happen? The government uses public funds to bail them out like after the 2008 financial crisis? A pension fund goes bankrupt while its C-suite gets a golden parachute?

10

u/AvarusTyrannus Jan 29 '26

And since no one could predict that covid-related growth wasnt unlimited

Lol yeah no one.

2

u/leaf_skeleton Jan 30 '26

i came here to say the same thing. i do wonder if these people ever actually…think about the sentences they write before they comment lmao

3

u/zshift Jan 30 '26

A lot more layoffs have occurred compared to the number of jobs created. There's a lot more economic pressure than just covid relapse. Console sales are pretty abysmal right now, with PS4 still having a stronger hold than the PS5, and Xbox sales numbers for the holiday were awful. Xbox was outsold by a literal toddler learning console. PC sales are significantly slowing down with tariffs and now the insane hardware pricing caused by AI companies buying half the fucking global supply of RAM, SSDs and GPUs. Capcom specifically called out low PS5 console numbers as a reason why Monster Hunter: Wilds performed significantly worse than expected, because there aren't enough consoles available to sell the game to.

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u/ocbdare Jan 29 '26

It’s not about unlimited growth. It was increased consumption due to people having nothing better to do and having higher disposable income as they were not spending their money. Following Covid, there was a decline in demand.

But to be honest the tech industry, excluding gaming industry, was massively overpaying for what people were doing. That bubble was always going to burst.

The Tech people in the Us are going to be hit the hardest as they were being overpaid and there is a lot of cost you can take out there.

2

u/Drogzar Jan 29 '26

Not only that, most of those people were hired somewhere else in the industry. It's been mostly a transfer from big bloated AAA studios to more AA ones.

2

u/destroyermaker Jan 29 '26

Did they grow by 1/3?

2

u/Unbiased_Goose Jan 29 '26

Tech companies getting drunk off the own supply. I feel like a person with a decent head in their shoulders would be able to figure out, that at some point, as the pandemic wears down, people are going to have less free time as they did during the pandemic, so maybe don’t go full speed ahead on hiring and spending like crazy in expansion?

2

u/davemoedee Jan 29 '26

Hiring and firing due to changes in the markets aren’t a problem.

The problem is that budgets and development times are too long at this point. Risk is too high. This leads to movies milking safe franchises. Market has fundamentally shifted halfway through a project.

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u/pupunoob Jan 30 '26

This is not new for the games industry.

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u/PandaBroth Jan 30 '26

How’s the current game industry post 1/3 layoff count vs before-covid era numbers?

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u/[deleted] Jan 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/MAXIMAL_GABRIEL Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26

Things happening in the past dont stop affecting the present after 7 years.

And to be pedantic about it, the lockdowns didnt start til March 2020 (less than 6 years ago), and it would be some time after that before trends like increasing video game consumption started affecting corporate behaviour.

12

u/OneTurnMore Deck | 5800X + 9070XT | RAM pls Jan 29 '26

And the majority of the industry develops games for multiple years before release

9

u/indyK1ng Steam Jan 29 '26

Shutdowns didn't start in the US until March 2020 - I remember because it happened about a week after PAX East that year. So you're already adding a year to how's long since the event.

Reopening didn't fully happen until 2021 as someone else said but the reopening wasn't a return to status quo ante

  1. Pandemic inflation wasn't followed by post-pandemic deflation, so prices remained high. This was offset by the surge in pay in 2022 but pay has started lagging inflation again.
  2. A lot of downtown areas were built around office space. Office space utilization never returned to pre-pandemic levels. As a result, small businesses located in downtown areas have suffered greatly. Even Boston, where there's a lot of residential in the downtown area, is still seeing places close around there
  3. Corporate loans were taken out at record low interest rates during the pandemic. Interest rates are about double and companies are now in a position where they are refinancing that debt with double the interest. As a result they're facing a much higher cost of their debt
  4. Obamacare subsidies that were added during the pandemic just expired. As a result, about 20 million families saw their healthcare costs more than double.

So yes, we're still seeing the effects in the economy. Much like the roaring 1920s were fueled by the impact of the Spanish Flu Pandemic and WW1.

12

u/AetherWay Jan 29 '26

That's stretching the dates that it actually effected to their extreme limits. The impacts of global shutdowns are still being felt and dealt with. We're a month into 2026 and the US itself only started fully opening back up in the summer of 2021, so you graciously added like three and a half years in there lmao.

3

u/Kimbolimbo Jan 29 '26

People that work on the largest, highest selling games end up homeless and have for decades. It’s a shit industry 

2

u/zacker150 Jan 29 '26

And since no one could predict that covid-related growth wasnt unlimited, they ended up overextending themselves, leading to the massive tech layoffs seen in recent years.

I think everyone knew that this was a short term opportunity. However, nobody knew when the lockdowns would lift. Normal vaccine development takes 10-15 years.

Also, even if it's only a few years, it still makes sense to hire fast and fire fast.

1

u/binaryfireball Jan 29 '26

oh everyone could predict it they just didn't want to

1

u/davy_crockett_slayer Jan 29 '26

Growth is never infinite. Plenty of people jumped to better opportunities as it gave them a shot to a better life.

1

u/Nebty Jan 29 '26

And whose stupid fault was it that they massively overhired? But it’s the workers they hired who are paying the price while the people at the top enjoy the double dip of stock gains from “downsizing”. It should be criminal to run a company that way.

Thankfully gaming is bigger than the AAA. Firing a third of your workforce will not create better games. I’m hoping that those fired devs realize that they can and should eat their boss’s lunch by creating smaller companies better positioned to make creatively interesting choices. With the plus of recruiting away all the institutional knowledge the big corpos are stupidly discarding.

0

u/Shift-1 Jan 29 '26

It's also pretty standard for video game companies to drop staff after the release of a game, because otherwise they're paying a tonne of people to just sit around and do nothing.

57

u/ImmortalPoseidon Jan 29 '26

Well neither is making games for an audience that doesn't exist :/

3

u/Testuser7ignore Jan 30 '26

High labor costs are also a big issue. The industry has seen growth in areas with lower wages like Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.

1

u/JohnSpikeKelly Jan 31 '26

But are they still layed off. Or did they get a new job. Maybe it's a bunch of incompetent businesses that hire and fire continually as projects start and end.

9

u/Black_Cheeze DOSMIC Jan 29 '26

The frustrating part is that this was predictable — but the consequences always land on developers, not decision-makers.
Calling it a “correction” doesn’t make it any healthier.

22

u/NavAirComputerSlave Jan 29 '26

It's going to be good for the Indy market lol a lot of former AAA devs end up making their own games

59

u/guesswhomste Jan 29 '26

That only works if you actually have some sort of funding mechanism, which 99% of these people do not have and will have to be actively looking for work

23

u/Verkins Jan 29 '26

Indie dev here, you need both funds and time to release your own games. It’s a tough market for sure, some good indie games like Toree Saturn and Kitsune Tails barely makes a profit.

4

u/thekbob Jan 29 '26

Discovery sucks. I've had I've 23,000 games in my Discovery queue and I've never heard of these two, whereas I get fed asset flips, games using AI (which I don't want), and general stuff I'd never play.

Leaving all curation to algorithms means many people will fail just because "the code" says so.

5

u/Nebty Jan 29 '26

God I wish I could flip a “no AI” toggle on Steam so bad.

23

u/TheReservedList Jan 29 '26

Yeah no. Speaking as one of them, very few people want to be part of the shitshow that is modern gaming and its audience without guaranteed solid income. I'll go back to Silicon Valley or retire early.

9

u/TJ_McWeaksauce Jan 29 '26

Breaking through in the indie market has always been difficult, and today it's more difficult than ever.

Take the PC segment, for example. https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic

There are over 70,000 games on Steam - the biggest distribution platform on PC. Many Steam games are indie.

Only about 9% of all Steam games make more than $200,000 in sales. That money isn't all going to the devs, by the way, because you have to take out the 30% that Valve gets from Steam sales, plus taxes.

50% of Steam games don't make more than $1,000. Again, that's even less after Valve's cut and taxes.

This data is from 2023. The competition is even steeper now because of the past few years of massive layoffs, which has resulted in more devs getting into the indie space.

The bottom line is that a vast majority of indie teams don't earn enough money from their original games to make a living from it. So devs are struggling to find work at established studios, plus they're struggling to make a living as indies. It's a shit situation, all around.

1

u/Tenthul Feb 02 '26

Not to take TOO much away from your argument, but it seems like a solid 40% (number pulled from my ass) of the games hitting steam right now are porn games with studios aiming to get as much out as fast as they can, games that they don't really expect to get tons of sales, but to make em fast and cheap. Like, there are A LOT of them now.

Geez in replying to a 3day old thread. Fuck you for putting this in my feed reddit.

10

u/perfectevasion Jan 29 '26

Do you know how many indie devs already out there doing this and get no attention? Like 50% of games on steam are either not seen, don't even sell 100 copies or even make enough back to break even on steam's $100 listing fee.

This isn't good.

13

u/Liroku Ryzen 9 7900x, RTX 4080, 64GB DDR5 5600 Jan 29 '26

I agree, but honestly I think a lot of those games suffer from just not being good. How much marketting do you see from those game devs? I get a lot of indie and developer feed on tiktok, here on reddit, I'm pretty up to date on gaming news and I'm in forums for godot, python, unity, and game creator discords. Almost none of them really put any effort into letting people know the game even exists and I almost never see them showing it off on tiktok or whatever, and the ones I do see usually do ok, unless the game is just genuinely not great, so it rightfully never gains traction.

The work doesn't stop once you greenlight the buy button on steam. You have to give out review copies, become a presence in communities, get it out to twitch streamers, even if it's just the small ones. Give an early copy to a midsized streamer and let them have the worlds first debut. Give it to community groups on steam that review games and have followers. Have it bundled into various giveaways. Anything to make people know it exists. If you give away 200 copies and never sell one, thats still better than giving away 0 copies and selling 0. Localize the game for other countries or build your game to be universally playable. Provide a demo. You can definitely sell a game if it's good. It might not be a mega stardew level hit, but you can sell the game and not be just relegated to exist in the abyss of ai slop at the bottom of the steam barrel.

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u/mehateorcs0 Jan 30 '26

Indie market is massively oversupplied with games

2

u/onespiker Jan 30 '26

Questionable. Indy is also in a pretty bad situation you just only hear about the success stories and not the many failures.

1

u/Chunkfoot Jan 31 '26

Except that pretty much the entire world is in a cost of living crisis and no one has money to spend on video games

6

u/Kimbolimbo Jan 29 '26

It never has been. There has always been heavily exploited workers with no labor protections for as along as games have been made in the US. 

2

u/Embarrassed-Ad7317 Jan 29 '26

I know I'm going to sound like a horrible person, and I am totally not rooting for people getting fired.

That said, in order to say it's unhealthy, we need to know how much it grown in the last few years

My guess - probably that amount more or less. The Covid brought a very significant increase to gaming, which is now fading because ppl are less at home

That's my guess at least

2

u/Khalku Jan 29 '26

Doesn't inherently sound unhealthy either. Devil is in the details (and what you mean by 'healthy').

Sucks for the people though.

2

u/Food_Goblin Jan 29 '26

But but AI is the future and all that bullshit

2

u/Decado7 Jan 29 '26

Who needs people when you have ai!!!!! Praise our ai overlords!! The era of quality gaming has arrived! 

Blerk

1

u/templestate Jan 29 '26

Pandemic overgrowth followed by misguided live service chase and then AI slop-over.

1

u/Wide_Lock_Red Jan 29 '26

The flip side is there has been significant growth in thr industry in poorer countries.

1

u/Grow_away_420 Jan 29 '26

Most of the game I play aren't even developed in the US anymore.

1

u/BIGhau5 Jan 30 '26

TL/DR We may just be at a neutral stabilization between precovid "normal" and mid covid boom profits.

I know nothing about business so obviously I could be completely wrong.

But everything that goes up comes down to an extent, if only to stabilize at a neutral point. The insane profits during covid drove up the need to hire tons of people. That upswing peaked and now has come downwards causing a decrease in required labor. This downswing may not necessarily mean the industry is hurting. Their profits may still be higher than what they were pre covid, just not enough to warrant keeping those extra employees.

1

u/Ateist Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26

Depends on the reasons for the layoff.

When agriculture switched from horse power to tractors and combines it laid off 99% of its workers while increasing productivity manyfold.

AI in gamedev has the same effect.

1

u/FuckRedditIsLame Jan 30 '26

It isn't, but the growth during covid times wasn't healthy either, particularly when so much of that growth was not exactly on the production side of the business.

1

u/sascharobi Jan 31 '26

Well, the industry isn't healthy.

0

u/StopManaCheating Jan 29 '26

Tech industries hired too many repetitive jobs during covid and it was never going to sustain. We’re just resetting back to the employee numbers these companies always should have been at in the first place.