The games industry is not in a good spot. I know this firsthand, having spent eight months applying to over 500 Game Dev and Game Dev adjacent jobs as I graduated college. I was reminded of this further when one of the keynote speakers at the MDEV industry conference started drinking on the main stage when discussing the state of the industry last year.
And the numbers back up the need for a beer. According to a Games Industry Report published by the Game Developer’s Conference, over 33% of surveyed games industry workers reported being laid off in the past two years. By some estimates, the total layoffs between 2022 and 2025 exceeded 45,000. California alone accounted for fifty percent of these. According to the ASGC Jobs Tracker, estimated layoffs for this year are expected to hit 14,000. For some, this is a tragedy, but a common one in the myopic modern economy. For another more vindictive crowd, these layoffs are a deserved fate for the monetization or politics of their favorite franchise.
Your AAA franchises—Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, Halo—require huge teams of people that are not only experienced developers, but are also deeply familiar with the lore and feel of the game. Somebody who has worked on two previous Fallout games is going to make a better Fallout game than a similarly experienced developer who hasn’t. Throwing together a new team of experienced devs won’t replenish the lost institutional knowledge. And aside from worldbuilding and game feel, many studios use proprietary technology that is notoriously finicky (think of Fallout 3’s workaround where a moving train was actually a piece of armor worn by a hidden NPC).
Indie and AA games have suffered greatly too, with numerous venerable studios being shuttered. But those that survived outright destruction will be in a better position to recover than their AAA big brothers. For one, they are less likely to be reliant on wacky in-house tech and prefer common industry tools. Furthermore, it’s much easier to rebuild a 20-50 person team than a 500 person team. They are also more likely to work on original titles that will always have a team unfamiliar with the world and mechanics, definitionally.
AAA gaming has not been thriving in recent years regardless, but up until now, the reasons have ranged from terrible monetization schemes, poor creative decision-making, or bloated production schemes. But with a few high-profile exceptions, studios still had experienced teams familiar with the worlds and mechanics of the games they were making. That will be rarer in the future.
Featured Image Credit: Roger Ce
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