35% of devs affected by layoffs last year, says GDC survey
Game Developers Conference organizer Informa released its annual State of the Games Industry survey today, giving a window into developer experiences and attitudes on a variety of subjects, including layoffs, generative AI, unionization, and on which engines and platforms they're making games.
Informa's press outlet Game Developer worked with its market intelligence firm Omdia to survey more than 3,000 game makers last October, and found that the parade of headlines about layoffs in the industry had been reflected in developers' personal experiences.
35% of respondents said that they had been impacted by layoffs in the past year, whether that was in the form of being laid off themselves (7%), seeing their colleagues laid off (17%), or having layoffs hit other teams and departments within their company (11%).
As for who bore the brunt of the cuts, QA teams were disproportionately affected, with 22% of QA developers surveyed having been laid off in the past year.
On the other end of the spectrum, just 2% of business and financial professionals surveyed said they had been laid off in the preceding year.
There was also some pessimism about the trend of layoffs keeping up, as 56% were at least slightly concerned that their company would have layoffs in the coming year.
The survey also tackled other workplace issues like crunch and unionization.
There was a slight increase in the percentage of people working an average of 40 hours a week or less, going from 62% in last year's survey to 64% this year.
Meanwhile, support for unionization grew from 53% in last year's survey to 57% this year, while opposition to them dropped slightly from 13% to 12%. On top of that, 5% of respondents said they were actually in a union.
Support for unions seemed tied to age, with 72% of respondents aged 18-24 being in favor of unionization and that number shrinking with every age group until hitting a low of 25% for those 65 or older.
The survey also polled developers on the trend of generative AI,
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