Gaming Industry Careers

What Data and DICE Tell Me About the Game Industry’s Future The energy at DICE this year was definitely more positive than last year, and I believe that was very real. But in the structure of that optimism, I see a growing acceptance that while big games and big companies will always exist, the industry is shifting in ways that will make it look very different in the years ahead. More games, title stickiness (at the top), and challenges in discoverability and influencer-driven growth test games in finding players more than ever. Headcount and resources are often still structured for a AAA and retail world, even as the industry moves away from that model. AAA output agility is relatively similar, yet games are judged faster and more harshly than ever as costs grow. Audiences react in a more binary way than in the past, making risk-taking harder. At the same time, AI tools are everywhere for every imaginable function. While the surface explanation is that these will only augment capability, I find it hard to believe that some of these tools will not also impact headcount. Many are talking about headcount shifting from the West in an Eastbound direction. More studios are trying to reconstitute, looking for co-development or work-for-hire projects. Many platforms are pushing shorter, lighter gameplay experiences – either mimicking mobile successes or taking a Roblox-like approach. For those still making AAA games, existing IPs seem to get priority for roadmaps, with studios valuing safety and predictability. When you put this all together, it paints a picture of an industry where bigger AAA titles from major studios become more of a franchise-based treat. Lower-cost experiences – some game depth lighter, some not – will grow, with headcount location seeing more shift due to cost. None of this is total, and all of it is quite gradual, but even as the industry recovers, where opportunities exist could be quite different both geographically and functionally. The 10,000 layoffs I forecast this year are part of that transition, and it will take time for these full effects to work through the system. A career in games is not irrational. But, like film or animation, we must accept that it is harder to achieve. A steady-state 20% chance of people landing a job in games within 12 months is realistic and that is my being upbeat and seeing recovery. We need to be honest and this is not about passion, effort, or fairness. The sooner we accept this, the sooner people can make informed decisions about their futures. I particularly believe those guiding folks at universities or in early-career stages need to be more sober and honest. Many who counted on games work will need to retool, shift skills, or relocate – outside of games – to make a living. I have always known my dream is games, but if I lost my job, I would flex into anything to survive. This is the reality we need to prepare for, and I still do not believe many have fully calibrated for it.

There were approximately 45,000 gaming jobs lost since 2022, and the way I see it, most of those people aren't going back to AAA. The GDC 2026 report found that one in three US game developers were laid off in the past two years. At AAA studios, two-thirds of employees said their employer had conducted layoffs. Q1 2024 alone wiped out over 8,600 jobs. The worst single quarter in gaming history. But they didn’t just lay off junior devs fresh out of school. Most of them were senior engineers, art directors, and producers with 10+ years of shipped titles. We’re currently in the era of the “Indie uprise” and quite frankly, investors are not prepared for it since 21% of developers now work independently and 32% have shifted to indie studios instead of AAA. The market loves this shift. Indie games generated $4.5 billion on Steam in 2025, 25% of the platform's total revenue. Nearly half of Steam's best sellers last year were indie or mid-size titles. We saw this before. The 2008-2009 crash scattered talent and directly fueled the indie boom of the early 2010s. Supergiant. Vlambeer. Subset Games. All founded by people who got pushed out. We’re coming full circle since it’s happening again. Players are voting with their wallets, moving away from spending $70 on live service games nobody asked for and supporting indie studios (or what gaming execs call “Friendslop”). And yet most gaming VCs are still writing $2M-$5M checks into studios that already have publisher deals. Whereas I see the real opportunity is much, much earlier. Pre-seed. When a team of three ex-AAA devs has a prototype and six months of runway from their severance. That’s where there's a systemic gap, we see experienced founders with proven skills and zero capital. The best time to back them isn’t when they have publishers and investors competing for a spot at the table, it’s before everyone else realizes they should. If you’ve recently been laid off, start that Indie studio, and to my fellow investors, back founders at the earliest stages. Image Source: THEGAMER #GamingIndustry #GamingInvestments #Gaming #Videogames #GameDev

Epic Games just laid off over 1,000 people. This happened again 🫠 Today, Tim Sweeney sent an internal note to staff announcing another round of cuts – this time, over 1,000 employees have been let go. The stated reason is a Fortnite engagement downturn that started in 2025, which pushed the company into spending significantly more than it's bringing in. Combined with $500M+ in identified savings across contracting, marketing, and open role closures, this is Epic trying to stabilize after a rough stretch. Tim states that the layoffs aren't AI-related – the note specifically calls that out, saying Epic wants more developers building great content, not fewer. The roadmap going forward: double down on Fortnite seasonal content and live events, push Fortnite's mobile return for global scale, and transition the engine business from UE5 and UEFN to Unreal Engine 6. The broader context Tim points to is real and matches what the whole industry has been dealing with – slower growth, weaker consumer spending, current-gen hardware underperforming last gen, and games competing for attention against a much wider entertainment landscape than five years ago. Epic just happened to ride higher than most during the boom, which makes the correction hit harder. For those affected, at least 4 months of base pay severance (more depending on tenure), 6 months of healthcare coverage in the US, accelerated stock vesting through January 2027, and up to 2 years to exercise equity options. Thousands of experienced engineers, artists, designers, and producers are now on the market. Full internal note: https://lnkd.in/dRkk_bEn

The video game industry isn’t going through an extinction of talent. It’s going through an extinction of viable places for talent to exist. To be clear, I don’t know the full extent of this individual’s situation yet, and I’m genuinely looking forward to hearing the full story when the episode drops, but the broader pattern this points to is very real, and it’s been building for years. What we’re watching isn’t some mysterious cultural collapse or a sudden disappearance of skilled people. It’s the outcome of an industry that bloated itself beyond sustainability, chased scale at all costs, and then acted shocked when gravity returned. Studios spent a decade hiring aggressively during a period of artificial growth. Development cycles stretched to five or seven years. Everything had to be a blockbuster, a platform, a live service, a forever game. When those bets didn’t pay off, the only lever left was layoffs. At the same time, return-to-office mandates quietly reintroduced a friction that many people underestimate. For senior or long-tenured talent, spending ten or more hours a week commuting, on top of already demanding workloads, is not trivial. Add in the cost of living in major studio hubs, housing pressure, relocating families, or being forced back into cities people intentionally left, and suddenly “just come back to the office” becomes a real career filter. That’s even before you even factor in outsourcing. Even as RTO mandates increase domestically, studios are expanding co-development and outsourcing overseas. Entire chunks of production are now handled by external teams that are simply more cost-effective than Western developers. When margins tighten, companies optimize for cost, and global labor markets make those decisions easier than ever. We could be looking at oversupply colliding with a contracting, cost-optimized market. Working on a famous title doesn’t guarantee future employment either. Hundreds of people can “work on” a game without owning what made it notable. When hiring slows, resumes stop carrying weight. Some studios may want smaller, cheaper, more flexible teams, not veterans priced for an industry model that no longer exists. Meanwhile, player behavior has changed. Spending has consolidated into a handful of live-service ecosystems, mobile games, and social platforms. Fewer players are buying multiple $70 games a year, and backlogs are infinite. Attention is scarce and production never adjusted...until now. This isn’t the death of games, it’s recalibration of a specific model. Smaller teams, AA studios, and focused projects can still thrive. If the industry wants to keep real talent, it has to make room for it again.

Revenue’s up. Studios are gone. When even growth leads to layoffs, what’s the point of winning? When a 5% revenue rise still leads to mass layoffs, something is off? On July 2, Microsoft shut down The Initiative and cancelled Perfect Dark, Everwild, and a new MMO from Zenimax. It cut 50% of staff at Turn 10 (Forza Motorsport), laid off 200 people at King Mobile in Barcelona, and made sweeping cuts across Raven Software and ZeniMax’s European offices. This is Xbox’s fourth round of layoffs in 18 months. The official line? “Prioritizing the strongest opportunities” and “removing management layers.” Meanwhile, leadership celebrates “more players, more games, more momentum than ever.” Even Xbox’s gaming revenue went up 5% year-over-year in Q3 2025. So why the cuts? What these facts show is a deeper shift in corporate logic: Success no longer protects you. Growth doesn’t guarantee stability. Layoffs are no longer signs of failure. They’ve become features of the system, routine moves in pursuit of "efficiency." The result? People lose their jobs because the company is doing well. When even growth costs you your role, what exactly are we celebrating? #TechLayoffs #GameIndustry #MicrosoftXbox

The Microsoft Game Studios layoffs yesterday were brutal and got me thinking about the games industry in general. If you work in the videogame industry you may want to quit reading because I'm about to write the most depressing words of my adult life. I've been gaming since the 80's. Introduced to it by my father, I even inherited his gaming rig when he passed. I used to follow the gaming industry closely but ever since gaming proved it wasn't recession proof in the 2008 financial crash they adopted what I called a multi-participant game of chicken by throwing most of their efforts into so-called "AAA" titles. Most of these games became expensive messes that did little to innovate and many studios that took on that strategy were shut down or gobbled up between then and today. This constant battle for the same market segment left people like me looking for new experiences to focus more on indie studios that often produced a much better product at half the price. I used to by dozens of games at full price prior to 2009 and in the last 5 years I have paid full freight for 3 games. I can't even name them. The gaming industry is huge and a major money maker, but also has a spending and innovation problem. It doesn't seem to understand it's demographics, who plays what kinds of games, and studios were becoming more and more bloated and expensive making it more challenging for each title to turn a profit. So what is next? Indie studios are not going to be able to absorb all the talent that has been let go across many studios these past few years. The focus and technology is so different even developers will need to reskill if they decide to move industries. Others will not be able to transition that easily. In the meantime I don't see it changing when the economy inevitably improves because the major studios are still dedicated to their suicide pact no matter how many of them close. It feels like some twisted battle royale to find out who will be the gaming equivalent of Taco Bell in Demolition Man. As for me I have my Steam Backlog of Shame (who doesn't?) and a wishlist that when I find a new job will still likely only pull the trigger on games $30 or less even if it means waiting for one of many sales. With so many people out of work, so many people who are struggling with groceries, where is the audience for a $60 to $80 piece of entertainment? I think for most people 2025 is going to be a better year but for game studios I expect there is more bad news to come. It needs a major shift in direction and strategy. It's not just me, my kids are the same way, their friends are the same way. I'm sure someone is buying the latest and greatest but I know fewer and fewer of them that do so.

More layoffs in games. I don't think it's AI. To be fair, AI (via LLMs) remains the dominant topic and rationale when this comes up. I think it's the excuse or an edge case reason given. If these companies weren't already distressed, they'd be taking time to understand LLMs, the impact, let the bubble settle a bit, take advantage of the current low cost of tokens before the price goes up... Instead, they are laying people off, cancelling games, shuttering studios, and consolidating around their "sure" bets. This isn't, "Wow, look at all the new things we're capable of, let's innovate with better tech!" It's more like, "We're in serious trouble and really don't know what to do about it." LLMs are seen as payroll reduction, not innovation enhancement. I was at GDC (albeit briefly) this year, and there was no shortage of conversations around LLMs and how they are changing things plus the threat they bring. But I think LLMs are instead functioning as a (broken) crutch. They can be given as the reason for "restructuring" or "strategy shifts" because they are everywhere and we're all trying to figure them out and according to the marketing copy they do allow fewer people to do more things. The struggle was already there though. The way money wasn't turning positive ROI when shoved into all the various trends and tech and game companies like everyone thought it would. The bad assumption that if you assemble highly pedigreed "best in class" experts they'll be likely to make a hit game, or the misguided attempt to use "productivity" as a way to understand if you're delivering value. These are perhaps bigger reasons for our struggle than LLMs. If anything, the bigger reason LLMs are causing trouble is because of how they contort the investment picture and suck up all the dollars that might otherwise be distributed elsewhere. This isn't a post "against LLMs." But the longer this goes on, the less I believe the primary or even significant reason for layoffs/shutdowns is caused because executives think LLMs are going to supercharge their people. The pattern doesn't work. These aren't healthy companies who just got more healthy. These were companies that were already rationalizing failure after failure while the economics (specifically and globally) tilted away from them. They weren't in good shape before, and as the macroeconomic picture declined, that became more obvious. The money stopped flowing in. The longer dev cycle, higher pay, and larger team size were crashing into a game industry containing "black hole" games and a genuine struggle for attention no matter how big your brand. The "better graphics, more content" was no longer something you could argue worked well. Perhaps it never did, but now the argument isn't really there to be made. Fewer winners, more losers, at every level of dev. Along comes LLMs as a potential savior but more immediately as justification for P&L corrections. They aren't the reason.

It pains me to see so many layoffs in the gaming industry. But there could be a very unfortunate reason for it. The gaming industry hired like a SaaS company. The assumption was that people would be there as long as the company exists. But making games does not work like building a SaaS product - at least not for the entire industry. Mobile F2P maybe, as they are structured for longevity. But for premium games, you build it, you ship it, and then for a significant portion of the team, that work is done. The question becomes what happens next. The analogy I keep coming back to is the movie industry. In that industry, most people work project to project. That is understood going in. There’s an ecosystem around it, unions, benefits, and a cultural contract between the people and the industry that makes it function. The ecosystem was built around the reality of how films get made. Gaming took a different path. It inherited the software employment model without the software revenue model, recurring products, continuous updates, and sustained teams. And it works for some companies. EA has EA FC shipping every year. There is always somewhere to move people. But for studios whose projects are more sporadic, the gap between one game shipping and the next one starting creates a headcount problem with very few clean options. The instinct when a game is doing well is to hire without fully mapping what those roles look like when the current project wraps. That timing question is critical and needs a clear plan from project to project. We’re at a cornerstone in how games are being made right now, and I don’t see the ecosystem changing to accommodate that change, hurting a lot of passionate and talented individuals.

These constant layoffs and RTO mandates will push the best developers to smaller studios or individual projects. Big publisher talent will continue to thin due to a lack of trust and executive overstepping. A common theme with peers is uncertainty. "When is it my turn?" That's not a climate where people do their best work. Fewer risks are taken and people are less likely to question choices. So big studio games can suffer because people aren't as committed and just go with the flow. I don’t think we’ll see a mass exodus from games. I think we’ll see more people opt into control by joining indies, starting micro-studios, consulting, partnering... building careers where trust is earned and decisions are closer to the work. (And hey, they can be partially funded by their next severence package). Indie isn’t easier (funding and discoverability are brutal), but the talent pool keeps getting stronger. The industry needs AAA games the same way film needs blockbusters. And indies push genres and possibilities free of the entanglements of corporate structures. It's not either/or, it's both. But it feels like the big studio structure could largely crumble in the next decade.