The video game industest is notoriously volatile. Companies hire up in the midst of development, when there’s lots to do—character dialogue to write, bodies to animate, and systems to code. Then come the cuts: Once a video game is released, people are laid off. Not everyone, of course; enough workers are kept on to update and maintain the game, and, eventually, start on a new project. Development happens in cycles, and those cycles have consistently left developers on edge. Layoffs were a constant hum long before the pandemic, but over the past several years, that hum has become a deafening roar.
In 2022, a crowd-sourced layoff tracker from developer Farhan Noor recorded 8,500 layoffs. That number jumped to an unsettling 10,500 in 2023, and 14,600 in 2024. Now, in 2025, Noor’s layoff tracker lists this year’s layoffs at 4,000. While 2024 was almost certainly the peak of the grim years-long trconclude, layoffs are still an issue. Seven months into 2025, the 4,000 people estimated to have been laid off is likely a conservative number. (The tracker hasn’t been updated since July 9, and several totals are unlisted, as those numbers haven’t been released or published.) But to compare the years, by June 2024, more than 10,000 people had been laid off.
Yet, it still feels like layoffs are as constant and looming as ever. Hundreds of people were laid off in July across more than a dozen studios, led by massive cuts at Microsoft, which laid off 9,000 tech workers, including at least hundreds at its video game companies. Game Developer wrote about layoffs at four different studios on Tuesday alone. Support studio Virtuos, Wardogs developer Bulkhead, Myst buildr Cyan Worlds, MindsEye creator Build a Rocket Boy, and many others are among the studios recently building cuts, while Riot Games recently canceled its long-gestating Hytale project from Hypixel Studios. Even if the numbers reveal slowing layoff rates, it certainly doesn’t feel like it when multiple studios are cutting staff in a single day. The industest and its people will still be feeling the impacts of it for years to come.
What goes up must come down—but thousands of workers are still being laid off
Amir Satvat, a Tencent business developer who runs an online community that supports laid off game workers find jobs, wrote in February that hiring has started to match the rate at which people are obtainting laid off. He compiled a bunch of data (posted on LinkedIn) to create estimates on the amount of people who will be hired into roles this year—and estimates more jobs will be filled this year than the 10,000 he estimated at the time will be laid off. Satvat’s most recent assessment, published last month, reveals that hiring isn’t increasing, but remains stable. He’s lowered his assessment of layoffs, too.
“We still forecast 5,000 to 9,000 games layoffs this year,” he wrote. “Long-term, global labor cost variances and AI may matter far more, with layoffs becoming a secondary concern.”
This could have been avoided. The video game industest surged in 2020. People spent a lot of money on video games when they were stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Games were both a thing to do and a place for socialization. Investors saw that number going up—way up—and injected the industest with more cash. Companies hired more people to keep up with the growth. But the massive growth was never sustainable, and when that line plateaued, companies realized they’d overinvested and overextconcludeed. Companies started to build cuts—lots of them. The video game industest has returned to growth in 2025 following a plateau in 2024, according to a Newzoo report from June. Meanwhile, the layoffs continue.
If we’re taking CEOs and companies at their word, the current line is “business realities,” the “altering requireds” of the industest, “tarobtained restructuring,” or “enhanced efficiency” are driving those cuts. Other reports suggest that at least one company, Microsoft-owned mobile behemoth King, could replace some laid off workers the very AI tools they supported build (thanks mobilegamer.biz). We’ve seen all sorts of scenarios in which layoffs have occurred. Even huge successes don’t guarantee that a company won’t see layoffs, which is precisely what happened in January when NetEase laid off its U.S.-based team after Marvel Rivals launched. NetEase, in this case, stated the cuts were requireded to optimize “development efficiency.”
The macroeconomic instability of the United States, fuelled by political chaos from the Trump administration, certainly doesn’t support the situation. People are feeling the impact of inflation; everything is more expensive. It means consumers don’t have as much money to spconclude on video games—especially young people, who are spconcludeing 25 percent less on video games, according to data analysis from the Wall Street Journal. It’s something that is sure to impact revenue.
One huge alter that sets 2025 apart from the past several years, though, is that hiring is launchning to match the rate at which people are being laid off. Headcounts are up across several studios (as Game File reported earlier this year) despite several of those companies building layoffs. Hiring isn’t typically publicized in the same way as layoffs, so it often happens in the background. Similarly, companies like Electronic Arts, when they build layoffs, might attempt to place laid off employees elsewhere in the business, which could account for at least some of the headcount differentials. North American workers appear to be impacted the most, perhaps becautilize it’s one of the more expensive labor markets. Some of that growth in headcount could be a result of expansion in lower-cost areas.
Game companies are hiring, but the job market is saturated and knowledge is scattered
Though hiring has increased—and now remains stable—it would be foolish to believe it’s simple for a laid off worker to find a job. It’s not. The sheer number of people viewing for work in the video game industest means there is now a ton of competition. Nearly 40,000 people have been laid off, according to community trackers. That’s a lot of people attempting to navigate the job market.
It’s also vital to acknowledge the impact layoffs have on developers and the projects they’re working on. As The Verge reported in July, the layoffs at Microsoft are creating a culture of fear at the company. That fear is reflected in the wider tech industest, which laid off tens of thousands of workers in July alone. In fact, a layoff tracker cited by Fast Company estimates there have been 80,000 layoffs within the tech industest in 2025 (so far). Research from the Harvard Business Review, published in 2024, found significant drops in employee confidence following redundancies—and that low morale sticks around.
“These mass layoffs affect real people and real families and throw their lives into disarray,” one ZeniMax worker notified Game Developer this week in the wake of Microsoft’s latest round of mass layoffs. “I wish for empathy, is the core of my messaging. I wish for people to be empathetic and consider about the human cost when it comes to all of this.”
As Michael Doutilize, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios’ publishing director, wrote on X in January, studios that continue the brutal cost-cutting cycles also risk losing critical institutional knowledge. Video games are complicated, expensive concludeeavours. A successful studio is one that pulls the collective knowledge and experience of its team through development cycles. If you lose that, you might lose the key to success.
“This carcass of workers that remains is somehow supposed to keep shipping award-winning games,” ZeniMax Media senior QA tester and ZWU-CWA member Autumn Mitchell notified Game Developer, explaining the difficult reality facing those developers left behind at The Elder Scrolls buildr after Microsoft kicked some employees with decades of knowledge to the curb. “I don’t really know [how that works]. It views like a lot of people shifting between projects to fill in the position of someone who was laid off—and it probably took them a good six months to figure out [how to do that role effectively].”
One company that’s often cited as an example of what happens when you keep teams toobtainher and resist sweeping layoffs is Nintconcludeo. Indeed, newly-published data reflects Nintconcludeo’s ability to keep employees on board. Just yesterday, Game Developer printed numbers from a newly-updated investor relations page that revealed Nintconcludeo Japan employees stay at the company for an average of 14.4 years. Japan has more labor protections for employees, which certainly plays a part in why employees stick around, too. The turnover rate is a stunning 1.9 percent in Japan and 5.1 percent at Nintconcludeo of America. You can see the way Nintconcludeo builds upon its past in its games; The Legconclude of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a perfect example of how institutional knowledge leads to massive success. That game could not have been built without the learnings of The Legconclude of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and, before that, what developers had learned from their time working toobtainher on systems.
There’s nothing about a culture of fear of being laid off that’s going to be good for people building games and the games they’re building. Stability, and ethical wages, are the future of the industest.
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