If there’s one kind of story that’s taken up an outsized part of the games industry’s news for the last few years, it’s layoff stories. For the last few years, it feels as though we can’t go a week without hearing about a studio laying off staff, resulting in tens of thousands of jobs lost and and an untold amount of talent suppressed.
The question these stories bring to mind is whether there’s a better way. How can the industry keep this from happening? Are layoffs inevitable? Or is there a way to avoid the circumstances that lead to layoffs in the first place?
With that topic front of mind, I spoke with several studios who have gone without large-scale layoffs in the last five years. The major question I wanted to ask was, “How?” They each had a different answer, but there were some common themes to their responses.
In order to better showcase how each studio serves its staff and gamers, I’ll tell the stories of each one in a subsequent article. The unique strengths of each studio are baked into their histories and purposes, and there’s simply too much information to tell all at once. I spoke with people from Jackbox Games, Rebellion Entertainment, DreadXP and Fireshine Games, and each one’s story offered a different perspective on the question.
But before we even get to the studios, let’s cover some fundamentals. Why has the games industry seen such ruinous layoffs in the last few years?
Layoffs and the games industry: Unfortunate reality?
In his book “Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry,” journalist Jason Schreier covered job instability in the games industry. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Studios hire staff to make games, inevitably run into the economic reality of having to employ those staff members long-term, and lay them off either when they run into hardships or even just when they’ve served their developmental purpose.
While those stories sound like they could have been told in the last three years, that book was published in 2021. This system of hire-develop-layoff appears to have been built into the fabric of modern game creation, but the post-pandemic period has sent the trend into overdrive.
Triple-A studios tend to have the largest layoffs, with places like Microsoft, Take-Two and Electronic Arts laying off hundreds of employees, often in a single day. Indie studios don’t exactly have it much better. Having smaller teams, they’re more likely to shut down entirely.
Amir Satvat, gaming jobs champion, reported in July that layoffs are happening faster than even he had predicted. He also noted in April that this is in part because there are more people trying to get into the games industry than it can sustain at present. “The pie is not shrinking, but far more people are trying to get a slice. That is another key part of why it feels much heavier.”
When I spoke to Satvat, he pointed out that location and culture also influence the studio’s sustainability, as Western and Eastern studios can differ vastly in their approach to layoffs. Even within those spheres, studios still approach hiring differently — an American studio in California or a Canadian studio in Montreal have different forms of institutional support and recognition.
“This is easier to say and harder to do,” Satvat told GamesBeat. “These places have intentionally stayed really lean. If you look at the numbers of what they’ve been doing, and ask yourself, ‘How many people would they need to do what they’re doing?’ The number always takes you by surprise. If you think they have 40, they have 25. If you think they have 100, they have 70.”
Is there a secret method? Not necessarily…
Overall, all of the people I spoke with had a marginally different answer for how their studio maintained itself. There were some common themes and answers, but overall the responses focused on knowing one’s own studio, its talents and its limitations. Each person with whom I spoke talked about their company’s history and the role it played in shaping who they are now.
Henry Hoare, DreadXP’s head of production and operations, told GamesBeat, “Our north star, our guiding light with everything is, as a developer, what would we want? How would we want to be treated?… There is only so big we can go and only so many projects we can carry at one time because of the way in which we do things.”
From Jason Kingsley, co-founder of Rebellion Entertainment I heard, “Our business is having an infrastructure and a bunch of talented people around us to help bring our visions to a market for a sensible price that other people really like and will pay money to pay and explore.”
Jasper Tanner-Barnes, Chief Portfolio officer at Fireshine Games, said, “It’s time. It’s attitude. It’s pragmatism. It’s selection of content. It’s portfolio design. It’s all sorts.”
With all of that in mind, keep an eye out for the next installment, in which I’ll cover two game studios who have been around for a long time and managed to refine their particular style and niche with the help of a longtime, consistent audience.