What the current wave of layoffs means for the games industry
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2023 continues to be a difficult year when it comes to layoffs.
In the past couple of weeks alone, companies including Ascendant Studios, Beamdog, Crystal Dynamics, Roblox, Blizzard, Epic Games, Team17, Naughty Dog, Twitch and Keywords have all dismissed varying numbers of staff, ranging from 10 Hearthstone developers to more than 800 Epic employees.
The reasons for these redundancies can vary. Crystal Dynamics and Beamdog, for example, were part of Embracer's ongoing restructure which also resulted in the closure of studios such as Volition. Meanwhile the Keywords layoffs reported today are a consequence of BioWare ending its contract with the services firm. But when job cuts make headlines so frequently in such a short space of time, it's easy to see there are wider issues at work.
GamesIndustry.biz reached out to a range of analysts, recruiters and investors, who all cite myriad factors that are a sign of the current economic climate: high interest rates, inflation, slowed growth, rising production costs, and increased competition (to name but a few). These challenges are not unique to gaming, as indicated by the widespread layoffs at major tech firms like Microsoft, Meta and Amazon.
"In gaming, the significance of 'efficiency' has risen dramatically over the last 18 months," Kantan Games CEO Serkan Toto tells us. "There is a much higher sense of urgency now to save costs and run slimmer organisations. The pressure is on for game industry CEOs to pull out the hammer and handle the biggest cost block of them all, namely staff. And this is what we have seen in 2023.
"All this happens under a sense of 'If we don't do it, our competitors
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