Gaming industry leaders have suggested that widespread job losses across the market last year could continue into 2024 and possibly into next year.
Farhan Noor, a game developer whose videogameslayoffs.com has tracked layoffs going back to the beginning of 2023, estimates that about 10,500 gaming industry employees were laid off last year.
And with less than a month to go until 2024, around 3,000 planned job cuts are thought to have already been confirmed.
Industry executives anonymously warned GamesIndustry.biz that tougher times are ahead for the market due to continued high interest rates, a glut of new releases, and cautious investors.
“If 2023 is the year of layoffs, 2024 will be the year of closures,” said the CEO of a publicly traded company. “It’s not just developers, but publishers, media and service companies as well.
“There are too many unprofitable businesses in video games,” they added. “We anticipate pain for up to two years.”
“Too many games were greenlit in 2020 and 2021. We need to get to pre-pandemic levels in terms of release schedules, and that will probably take two years,” said one publisher chief. .
“We're already seeing publishers signing up fewer games. It's happening everywhere. It's not just Steam, stores are saturated and games aren't delivering at the level they used to. .”
The latest GDC State of the Game Industry survey found that around a third of developers were affected by layoffs at work in the 12 months to October 2023.
When asked how concerned they are about layoffs in the 12 months to October 2024, 14% of more than 3,000 respondents were very concerned and 16% were somewhat concerned. , 26% said they were somewhat concerned.
Some of those surveyed provided anonymous feedback, including their thoughts on the rise in layoffs across the industry.
One respondent said, “Studios grew too fast during the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis left people with less money to spend on games.” “Sadly, the bubble is bursting. We hope that new startups will be born that will revolutionize the way we develop games and set a precedent for larger studios to follow.”
Another person wrote: “This layoff is concerning because it doesn't seem to follow the 'typical' cyclical trend of layoffs occurring after a project ships. Not that it's great, but these days it's hard to see when and where layoffs happen. It’s hard to predict.”
