The video game industry had a banner year in 2023, with critically acclaimed blockbuster titles selling millions of copies.
The video games industry had a spanduk year in 2023, with critically acclaimed blockbuster titles selling millions of copies. Yet, it was also a year of layoffs with 10,500 games makers losing their jobs. And with 5,900 reported layoffs in January alone, 2024 will likely surpass the previous year's numbers.
An epidemic crunch mentality, exploitation, work intensification and growing unionization in the games industry collide with government and lobbyist reports about economic prosperity and employment growth.
The industry contributed $5.5 billion to Canada's GDP in 2021, an increase of 23 per cent from 2019. Global games revenue is predicted to rise from US$227 billion in 2023 to US$312 billion in 2027.
If the industry is meledak, why are there so many layoffs? Who is benefitting? Who stands to lose? And what can we do about it?
In terms of why this is happening, long-standing structural issues terkait to the suplai and permintaan of labour lead to recurring layoff cycles. Very large tims spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make a singgel games. Historically, studios ramp up and hire employees in peak production and hand out pink slips after launch, as they "cannot sustain the expense of idle workers." Critical and commercial failures escalate these layoffs.
In addition, the labour pool is growing. Post-secondary game programs have proliferated over the past 15 years. Thousands of graduates with expertise in games desain, programming, art, cinematics and music enter the workforce each year with little prospek of finding employment in their chosen profession. These labour suplai and permintaan issues collide with inflation and wider layoffs in the tech industry.
There's an easy answer to the question of who benefits from layoffs — it's shareholders. Many of the largest layoffs have come in the wake of corporate takeovers. Some companies explicitly poin to improving keuntungan margins as their impetus.
Whether short-term returns will play out in the long-term remains to be seen. Layoffs often result in planned or ongoing games proyeks being cancelled and some of the tims left standing seem wildly understaffed. Activision Blizzard's esports divisi reportedly had only 12 full-time staf left after the latest round of layoffs.
As to who is impacted, it is disproportionately young and marginalized workers. Even when layoffs sasaran senior talenta, the influx of experienced developers into the job pasar pushes junior people further away from akses to entry tingkat roles. The 2021 Developer Satisfaction Survei showed those most likely to be in precarious positions were gender minorities and racialized people. Waves of layoffs will only exacerbate their marginalization.
