It feels like every day I see a post about some big game development studio laying off a large chunk of their workforce. What are the causes of this?
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Many responses here are citing the layoff cycle…..
Aka, you hire once you have the investment at the start and layoff at the end to look more secure for further investment.
Yes, this happens, but normally, this is a lot of temp workers, short-term contracts, and most employees would be hired knowing this is going to happen.
What is happening at the moment is kind of unprecedented since the birth of the modern gaming industry. We’re seeing thousands of game devs loing their jobs across the board. People, in some cases who have been with these companies for over a decade.
I know this is anecdotal, but here in the UK, I know four guys who work for big game companies, all being laid off or in departments suffering large-scale layoffs. In all cases, it’s been confirmed by the higher-ups that it’s rising costs and wages being behind this.
This is resulting in a lot of restructuring, where a lot of work is being outsourced to cheap third parties in Eastern Europe and South East Asia.
You also have a lot of multi-national large-scale purchases and mergers, which always results in restructuring layoffs.
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