The video games industry is estimated to have suffered around 9,000 job losses this year, according to developer Farhan Noir, who has been tracking lay offs from the start of 2023 .
The five companies that have seen the most job losses, as of December 10, are Unity (1,165), ByteDance (1,000), Embracer Group (964), Epic (830), and Amazon (715). However, many other studios have cut jobs this year including CD Projekt RED, Crystal Dynamics, Digital Extremes, Digital Bros, BioWare, Electronic Arts, Frontier Developments, Riot Games, Sony, take-Two, Team17, Ubisoft, and Xbox Game Studios.
Just yesterday, it was revealed that TimeSplitters creator Free Radical had been shut down resulting in the loss of 80 jobs, yet another casualty of Embracer Group’s ongoing restructuring program.
Speaking with GamesIndusry.biz recently, Serkan Toto, an industry consultant, commented:
In gaming, the significance of ‘efficiency’ has risen dramatically over the last 18 months. There is a much higher sense of urgency now to save costs and run slimmer organisations. The pressure is on for game industry CEOs to pull out the hammer and handle the biggest cost block of them all, namely staff. And this is what we have seen in 2023.
All this happens under a sense of ‘If we don’t do it, our competitors will and then eliminate us on efficiency,’ and people get fired left and right at the moment. There is also the phenomenon that often CEOs think 15% to 20% of their people are redundant anyway at any point in time.
[Source – VideoGameLayoffs]