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What’s going on with all these video game industry layoffs?
19.02.2024 - 17:40 / polygon.com
The video game industry has never been known for its job security. Game development works in cycles, and when games are released and projects end, people are often laid off. When the next project starts, hiring begins once again only for another potential cut down the line. It was hard for video game developers to feel comfortable in their positions before the most recent period of unprecedented instability. But over the past few years, it’s become a downright crisis.
After an industry boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, when video games surged in popularity amid lockdown restrictions that kept people at home, cracks started to show in 2022 — and it’s only gotten worse from there. Roughly 8,500 video game industry workers were laid off in 2022, according to a layoff tracker created by video game artist Farhan Noor. That number jumped to 10,500 in 2023. Layoffs in 2024 are outpacing those numbers, with more than 6,000 people laid off from their video game industry jobs just 90 days into the year.
Impacted studios run the gamut from small, independent shops to massive gaming giants. Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees from its gaming division and game engine maker Unity cut 1,800 cuts, while League of Legends developer Riot Games and Amazon-owned Twitch laid off hundreds each. Airship Syndicate, a smaller studio that develops Wayfinder, laid off 12 people; Outriders developer People Can Fly laid off more than 30; and Embracer Group-owned Lost Boys Interactive laid off 125 people, among the dozens of other studios that laid off staff. (Embracer itself laid off at least 1,400 people this year.) Reasons vary across companies, but industry leadership seems to agree that this is either constriction after overexpansion during the pandemic or a response to an economic downturn. Other executives spoke about spending more than their company earned, or stalled video game revenue.
But, according to experts, those explanations are only one part of the story.
Laine Nooney, New York University assistant professor of media and information industries, told Polygon over email in late January that this moment is a culmination of two separate but interconnected factors. The first is that video games saw “unprecedented levels of engagement” during the pandemic, Nooney said. Because people were stuck indoors due to lockdown restrictions, there was record growth and companies expanded. The problem was that executives did not consider that this upswing would stall — or backslide.
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“It’s hard to believe now, but the cultural conversation at the time was really driven by this belief that these gains would hold, and that we were experiencing a fundamental and inalterable shift in cultural behavior,” Nooney said. “The
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