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Layoffs, gaming at the Web Summit and Project Flagpole — The DeanBeat

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

The game world has been beset by layoffs in the past couple of months, as companies reset their expectations after a year of consumer pullback and excessive competition.

The videogamelayoffs.com site has tracked this gloomy progression, with at least 6,500 job cuts this year. As I head back from the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, where I moderated three sessions on gaming, this topic of the game industry’s woes and its resilience are on my mind. The layoffs have hit Kongregate, Humble Bundle, 505 Games, Ubisoft, Amazon Games — the list goes on and on.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.