I wonder how close to pre-2020 numbers the industry is currently at. I know several companies increased their employee count due to big game sales during COVID, but once people could leave their houses again sales leveled off and then the layoffs started happening.
That’s fucking brutal
Is it dot com bubble levels of lay offs? I just want to have some kind of reference point, not being rude.
It’s messy, there are a lot of people laid off, but also there are a lot of companies snatching up talent. I know some games people that have been laid off three times in the past 2 years :/
Good that some companies can invest in talent. It must be tough to lose a job, get a new job and then lose that one as well within two years and I can’t imagine how it would feel like to lose my job three times in two years.
unfortunately the game industry is full of that crap, that’s why unions are starting to pop up.
It’s basically contract gigs. Someone has a hit on their hands, so they have unlimited cash to get it out the door, someone else’s title does poorly in focus groups, they companies just shed their mid tier workers and they hop company to company
But Microsoft pinky promised that allowing them to breach anti-trust law would not result in layoffs.
I was included in this. Was laid off back in June 2025. One of the best places I ever worked.
The industry is super tough. I got very lucky & started a new job at the beginning of the month. Being out of work for 6 months sucked, and some people I mentor have been out much longer.
Sounds like a massive opportunity to form a lot of new indie studios that isn’t happening. Or people aren’t announcing it.
it’s not happening because at the same time the willingness of investors to find new studios and games also drastically went down
Investors are not required to form an indie studio. They are not required to build a fun game that makes a lot of money. Indie studios do not require massive injections of cash. Most indie studios are formed on what is available to the team collectively. It isn’t something that is easy, it takes effort, but it is not impossible. Most indie studios are initially formed with like, less than $20k USD in total investment. Many are just one guy with a budget of $0.
It is more likely that the amount of money that an investor would realistically need to give is considered too small to be worth the PR, but too big to just give away in a whim. Enough that one or multiple studio members could easily take out a personal load to invest into the studio without needing a private investor.
Now, if those people are demanding multiple big six+ figure investments, then they aren’t trying to form an indie studio, they’re trying to form a AAA studio that is publisher independant. Which is an unreasonable ask.
Investors are not required to form an indie studio, in the case where every team member of that studio has some means to pay their own rent/mortgage, bills, and feed themselves for the entire duration of the project. If you’re in the US, you’ll also need to figure out how you’re paying for health insurance. This could be a passion project in addition to a day job, but coordinating work/life balance in that scenario with multiple team members is exponentially difficult.
Money adds up quick. Let’s use some round numbers and say you want to hire a team with some experience (those folks that just got laid off and are looking for work). Let’s say everybody on the team costs the project $100k/year in salary & benefits. Let’s just imagine that includes costs a normal employer would pay: insurance premiums, IT hosting costs, all the little stuff. Note, this is underpaying people with more than 5 years experience who live in California (where many game dev studios are based). Let’s say you can get the game made in one year with everybody starting on day one and ending on ship day, exactly 365 days later. People will be wearing multiple hats, but let’s be general.
- 1x Gameplay Programmer
- 1x 3D Artist (general modeler)
- 1x 2D Artist (general texture artist)
- 1x Game Designer (Camera/Controls/Combat)
- 1x Audio Designer
$500k
Expanding that team:
- 1x Animator
- 1x Character Artist
- 1x Environment Artist
- 1x Prop Artist
- 1x VFX Artist
- 1x Lighting Specialist
- 1x Tools Programmer
- 1x Render/Optimization Programmer
- 1x Level Designer
- 1x Narrative Designer
$1.5M
That’s a 15 person studio, where people are still wearing multiple hats like UI, Music, IT, Testing, other things I’m forgetting about. This isn’t anywhere close to a AAA sized team of 100+ people.
This is also assuming you can stick to a STRICT time schedule. In reality you’re probably going to need a very small team at the start and not grow until you finish prototyping, then again once you’ve done a vertical slice.
Anyway. This post got real long. The gist of it is the people making the game need that money to live. There should be space in the industry to make a game with a team this size, paying your employees something close to what the big studios pay them. Getting that kind of money has been incredibly difficult these past few years.
^^^ This is exactly how it works.
You ‘can’ bootstrap an indie with an Artist and a Dev, but they need to be the best ever at their job and be able to wear a ton of hats, work for nothing and somehow manage to never burn out. The vast majority of games that run that way never see the light of day.
