From the Dead Space remake in January to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in May to Baldur’s Gate 3 in August and the pile of acclaimed games that came out in October, some would say it’s been a banner year for the games industry.
Except it hasn’t. And those of us who play games need to realize it.
2023, for all the games it has given us, has also been marked by over 6,000 layoffs since January. As of publishing this article, the number is over 6,500. (Check out Farhan Noor’s Game Industry Layoffs Blog for up-to-date numbers.)
Six thousand, five hundred. Let that sink in. That’s more than my hometown. That’s 6,500 people who can’t pay a mortgage, who can’t afford health insurance, who can’t afford to move again to find another opportunity.
And for the 6,500 laid off, what about those dealing with the guilt of having survived a layoff? Having to deal with added pressure and responsibilities to make up for their lost co-workers, meeting deadlines with a much smaller team, crunch…
Bungie laid off around a hundred employees on October 30th, and seeing the reactions of those laid off, as well as those still there, mourning the loss of their coworkers, should be a wake-up call that this is not okay in an industry that brings in hundreds of billions of dollars globally in a year. Global game revenue blows the worldwide box office out of the water, we’ve known that for years now.
Honestly, it should have happened after the Epic Games layoffs in September, where Tim Sweeney straight up said “For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” but this is America and capitalism rules the roost. How did the Epic layoffs go? Were C-Suite employees, the ones who make the decisions on how to spend money shown the door?
No, they weren’t. They just ‘promised’ that there won’t be any more layoffs, and are still going to be hiring anyway. Would Tim Sweeney, with his net worth of $4.1 billion take a pay cut like Satoru Iwata and other Nintendo executives after the Wii U failed to perform? Also no.
This story brings us back to Bungie. When Sony purchased Bungie, mainly to have access to their live-service knowledge, $1.2 billion of the $3.6 billion deal was to be set aside for “deferred payments to employee shareholders, conditional upon their continued employment, and other retention incentives.” Bungie isn’t a public company, so a great deal of shares are owned by employees.
Was $1.2 billion not enough to keep these employees employed for more than a year after the transaction?
Bungie’s woes continued as reporting kept coming out, with sources saying that Pete Parsons told employees that “the right people” were left to right the ship, and the reason for the cuts was that the studio was an astounding 45% off on revenue projections. According to Forbes, some executives forfeited yearly bonuses before layoffs happened, but if they were missing revenue by that much, would they have even gotten bonuses?
On 10/31, Paul Tassi from Forbes also reported from a source that the layoffs were Bungie’s call and not Sony’s, most employee benefits would only last the end of the month (so one day), and the incentive program? Only an incentive if you were to stay with the company for a certain amount of years. If fired, that obviously won’t happen.
Shifting gears, let’s consider Bioware, who laid off 50 members of their Edmonton studio earlier this year. In a case like theirs, they should be able to use their portfolios to gain employment elsewhere.
Except they can’t use anything recent in said portfolios, because everything Dragon Age: Dreadwolf related has strict NDAs attached, and who knows when we’ll see the finished product. A number of the laid-off employees are currently suing Bioware for fair severance pay and a request for punitive damages as a result.
There are many, many, many (too many) layoff stories this year that can be chased back to terrible management at the highest levels. I wish I could highlight them all in this editorial.
Change must happen.
We’re not a huge outlet. We’re volunteers who do this because we love games, and we wouldn’t have the games we love without the devs behind them. Everyone from QA to art to engineering to social media and community and all the disciplines I didn’t list here. (Because there’s a lot. Also: If you work on a game, you’re a dev!)
We’re worried about the future, about students and others who are still looking to get into games and the industry. Honestly, with all this instability, why would they or why should they subject themselves to what’s happening? Without bright new talent, where does the industry go after a year like 2023 and the games we’ve been able to play? And why should current developers (or anyone, really) have to live in an anxiety-ridden world where they could be let go at any moment even if they’re doing great work? That’s not sustainable for a person, let alone an entire industry.
So many devs behind the games we’ve loved this year have been laid off and are looking for work. It’s clear that something drastic needs to happen.
Personally, I hope every dev who wins an award at The Game Awards this year talks about the human toll this year has taken on their project or their studio. I hope everyone is allowed to wear a union pin this year. I hope Geoff Keighley takes his platform and actually makes some sort of statement in support of the thousands and thousands of those who MADE the games being honored, not just their bosses.
People make the games we love, and it’s time they were treated with the respect (and job security) they deserve.