I think it’s safe to say the quiet part out loud at this point: The video game industry is falling apart.
Company after company has been hemorrhaging employees. Just today, Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees from Xbox and Activision-Blizzard and Reikon let go approximately 80 percent of its employees. Earlier this week, Riot Games cut 530 staffers. People Can Fly Studios and Black Forest Games were also hit with layoffs in the past few days. At this point, the number of employees impacted by gaming industry cuts is so high, we’re already halfway past the total number of people laid off in 2023.
And it’s only January.
2024’s video game layoffs are that bad
The news comes from developer Rami Ismail, who shared statistics published on the Game Industry Layoffs page, a website run by Riot Games technical artist Farhan Noor. It’s worth noting that it’s unclear if Noor himself was impacted by this week’s Riot Games layoffs.
Noor’s site collects data on layoffs throughout the gaming industry, year by year. According to Noor, an estimated total of 10,500 employees in the games industry were laid off during 2023, an increase from 2022’s 8,500 cuts. With today’s layoffs, there are now an estimated 5,932 cuts in 2024 alone, per Kotaku.
For the record, I had to update this article after I turned it in because Reiko’s layoff news dropped in the interim. It’s that bad out there.
As for the wide assortment of January cuts, it’s certainly possible that many studios elected to wait until the new year to begin layoffs. Holiday cuts are brutal for morale, and laying off employees right before (or during!) Christmas season tends to obliterate workers’ trust in management. The Xbox cuts were also somewhat expected, as Noor pointed out in his 2023 retrospective: Microsoft generally cuts employees after acquisitions, and Xbox recently merged with Activision-Blizzard.
Still, even if we don’t factor in the Xbox layoffs, January already began with approximately 3,770 employees losing their jobs. That’s a massive escalation from last January, the full data from which isn’t on Noor’s site, but still likely did not come anywhere near the 3,000 mark. Let alone 5,670 employees. So holiday cuts alone cannot explain the full range of job losses in January 2024. If it did, it’s likely that we would have seen similar layoffs rates between January 2023 and January 2024.
It’s clear the games industry is entering 2024 in a tumultuous state. Job losses are accelerating, and more and more game developers find themselves thrown to the curb, unable to find work. For the artists, designers, and creators that keep this industry afloat, their careers are now uncertain, especially as advances in AI offer cheap—and, more often than not, bad—content that threatens their ability to make an income.
(featured image: Riot Games)
