Why do games media layoffs keep happening?

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If you have been following the headlines, you may conclude that no one is reading very much these days.

After all, layoffs in games media have been taking place with alarming frequency, with businesses often citing "structure change", "supply-chain issues" and "very tough market environment". Yet amidst conversations around these layoffs, there's one game that keeps cropping up: Elden Ring. Or, to be specific, its pivotal role in introducing much-needed traffic to a website.

"We had gigantic traffic when Elden Ring came out, it was massive and that had gone down a bit when there weren't as many big titles like that," says Carli Velocci, a freelance journalist who was laid off from her position as gaming editor of several Future publications, including Android Central, iMore, and Windows Central. "That, [combined] with the pandemic, games coverage was in an interesting place because it's the big games [that] get the most traffic unless there's a breakout [or] crossover hit."

Layoffs are now endemic to the games media landscape and the broader journalism field, with many affected sites held together by a skeleton crew or operating with a masthead of newer writers.

"It's reassuring... but also very frustrating. We weren't laid off for underperforming"

Just last month, Inverse laid off some members of its editorial team. In April, Waypoint, the games vertical from Vice Media, was unceremoniously shut down, alongside organisation-wide layoffs in the parent company. And prior to its shuttering was a brutal slashing of jobs across several publications, including The Washington Post's Launcher, Fanbyte, and websites under the Gamurs Group and Future