What is going on with layoffs in the video games industry?
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom shipped 10m copies in a weekend. Hogwarts Legacy sold 24m units in a year. Palworld is on 25 million players. Spider-Man 2 was Sony's fastest-selling game. Starfield broke Bethesda records. And then there's been Diablo 4, Super Mario Bros Wonder, Baldur's Gate 3, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Resident Evil 4... sales records have been broken consistently over the past 12 months. But then there have been those other headlines. You've seen them, too. 860 layoffs at Epic. 1800 redundancies at Unity. 1900 by Xbox. 900 by PlayStation. 530 at Riot. Nearly 700 at EA. I would give a running total of how many people have publicly lost their jobs in games over the last year, but the likelihood is that by the time this article comes out, the number will have gone up. What the hell is going on? The answer has multiple facets to it, and to fully explain I need to take you back to 2019 BC (Before-Covid). Read more
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom shipped 10m copies in a weekend. Hogwarts Legacy sold 24m units in a year. Palworld is on 25 million players. Spider-Man 2 was Sony's fastest-selling game. Starfield broke Bethesda records. And then there's been Diablo 4, Super Mario Bros Wonder, Baldur's Gate 3, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Resident Evil 4... sales records have been broken consistently over the past 12 months.
But then there have been those other headlines. You've seen them, too. 860 layoffs at Epic. 1800 redundancies at Unity. 1900 by Xbox. 900 by PlayStation. 530 at Riot. Nearly 700 at EA. I would give a running total of how many people have publicly lost their jobs in games over the last year, but the likelihood is that by the time this article comes out, the number will have gone up.
What the hell is going on? The answer has multiple facets to it, and to fully explain I need to take you back to 2019 BC (Before-Covid).
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