2024 has already had more video game industry layoffs than all of 2023 — and it’s only June
The video game industry reached a grim milestone in 2023 as the year closed with more than 10,000 layoffs affecting programmers, quality assurance workers, sound designers, and artists — alongside countless other people and job titles. But the new year did nothing to stop the trajectory of layoffs. Just days into 2024, more than 2,000 video game industry workers were laid off from game engine maker Unity and streaming platform Twitch — and in the months that followed, that number continued to climb. Now, the industry has reached another unfortunate landmark event: Just six months into the year, the total number of video game industry layoffs in 2024 has surpassed 2023’s total of just over 10,000.
The numbers, for both 2023 and 2024, are conservative, community-counted estimates from technical artist Farhan Noor’s layoff tracker and from Polygon’s own count; there are likely well over 10,000 people laid off from the video game industry across the globe. Though the data is not exact, it tells a devastating tale — as CEOs bemoan an economic downturn, the workers who make games continue to suffer the consequences of leadership’s decisions. Of course, video game companies are still hiring, and some, like Nintendo, continue to up their employee pools. Although hire-and-layoff cycles aren’t necessarily uncommon in the video game industry — The Conversation rightly called it a “long-standing structural issue” in which companies boost hiring during production, then fire workers after launch — the scope of the current situation is unprecedented.
Even Geoff Keighley, the video game industry’s unofficial hype man, could no longer ignore reality: Keighley briefly paused the sparkle and shine of his Summer Game Fest broadcast to acknowledge the layoffs and studio closures.
The video game industry isn’t necessarily doing badly. Market analyst Newzoo estimated that the global video game industry would generate $184 billion in 2023, a return to growth — albeit a small one — after a
Read more on polygon.com
