Culture 1 in 3 Game Developers Laid Off - "Go Woke, Go Broke"

"I’ve been laid off so many times in the last 5-6 years, had so many turbulent issues working in games. I have trauma and can’t ever fully trust anywhere now.- MANAGER (GAME DESIGN), CALIFORNIA"

GDC's festival of gaming released their yearly report on the gaming industry for this year. A lot of it confirms what some gamers have already come to the conclusion of when looing at games such as Dragon Age: Veilguard, Concord, or Highguard.

Right off the bat, the cover of the PDF shows what looks like to be a troon:

Spoiler: Troon

The interesting statistics worth noting in the PDF are that of age, LGBT+ identification, and gender identification, as seen here with explanation of metrics:

Spoiler: Infographics

Spoiler: Explanation of Metrics

Spoiler: Race/Ethnic Origin

Spoiler: Country of Residence (Thought India would be higher)

Spoiler: US State Origins

Spoiler: Experience & Company Type

Spoiler: Laid off in the past 24 months

This is just the tip of the PDF findings, but these are a majority of them. I end off the article with this image:

https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-2026-state-of-the-game-industry-reveals-impact-of-layoffs-generative-ai-and-more/

https://megalodon.jp/2026-0225-0934-22/https://gdconf.com:443/article/gdc-2026-state-of-the-game-industry-reveals-impact-of-layoffs-generative-ai-and-more/

 

[Duane Dibbley]

Ever since the pandemic ended, the AAA industry has been in a slow burn 1983 style crash.

WFH was the nail in the slow burning coffin before it was pushed into the incinerator.
The wokies and DEI hires lied on the 20% of the competent workforce to do their work for them, and cover for them. When WFH hit and individuals were given individual targets, the rot of the 80% became pretty obvious.

The realisation is that it's too late to fix and the only way to return to tradition is to burn everything down.

 

[TowinKarz]

WFH was the nail in the slow burning coffin before it was pushed into the incinerator.

I'm not sure if WFH was the issue as much as just general bloat.

I have family who work in the professional graphics arts/games scene, and they've been WFH for years at this point.

Long before COVID, long before the games industry homogenized into "AAA gaming"?

There was already a big chunk of the workforce that would come to the office for meetings and pitches, but? Did all the "grunt" work, the designing and rendering from home on a tablet and mailed it in.

WFH just separated the wheat from the chaff and showed who actually produces work of value and who just takes a six figure salary to attend Zoom calls and remind everyone that the feelings of black lesbian amputees who suffer from agoraphobia have not been properly represented in the latest build.

Because every one of these AAA studios got fat off the one-two punch of COVID. Free PPP money and the non-organic increase in gaming from people being stuck at home and out of work making them think the promised "Modern Audience" had finally come out of their caves to buy woke slop.

Now that it's all over? They're realizing 75% of the people they hired to meet that demand did nothing and are no longer needed.

 

[Haramburger]

Society does not need you to be a full time with benefits Fat Person Of Color Character Designer, when some guy can make Balatro as a portfolio demo on the side but then just decide to sell it directly instead.

 

[ChefKiss]

"""Game Developers""" and it's mostly nonsense DEI hires who do "game design" (argue about how the game needs to be retard easy) or "art direction" (use the gay purple and make everyone brown)
Any game developer worth a shit started their own company. AAA is basically all the same people getting shuffled around, the same cliques of diversity hires re-hiring each other from one failure to the next, sucking every penny they can like the parasites they are

 

[Dysnomia]

I posted a link to the article, idk how to archive things or post download link to the PDF. I'm a newfag ik

Lurk moar. Don't worry OP. I still love you.

Anyway, a lot of wat these laid off workers would have developed is slop anyway. We aren't missing much. For every cancelled or delayed game that would have been good there are fucktons more that are absolute trash that just wasted money. Just go back to making good games already.

 

[Agares]

WFH was the nail in the slow burning coffin before it was pushed into the incinerator.
The wokies and DEI hires lied on the 20% of the competent workforce to do their work for them, and cover for them. When WFH hit and individuals were given individual targets, the rot of the 80% became pretty obvious.

The realisation is that it's too late to fix and the only way to return to tradition is to burn everything down.

I firmly believe there was wokie infiltration at some point. Maybe they got into the HR, maybe they got in through other channels but once an organization gets infiltrated, they only hire other wokies and start policing the politics. It's kind of similar to Indian nepotism.

 

[Tanner Glass]

WFH was the nail in the slow burning coffin before it was pushed into the incinerator.

It's not really WFH, as these problems have been systemic for a very long time.

The core of it is simply Video Game Development does not scale like a normal business. A lot of 30 person teams found success and formed larger companies and made better games (think GTA3 to GTA4, HL1 to HL2, etc) with larger teams eventually landing on ~100 (Skyrim and several other games) as the norm.

Eventually you started seeing some companies using multiple studios to keep releases on a fast cadence (like Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 being designed at the same time, Call of Duty having two/three studios making a game every year, etc)

But bigger is always supposed to be better and GTA V (and GTA Online) had ~400 core people, and satellite studios on top of it and made ungodly piles of money and that became the model everyone chased that model and saw huge diminishing returns for most studios.

From ~2010 on, most studios swelled up to 300+ headcount and the effects were very visible - a 300 person team is too huge to get moving in one direction and a lot of IPs took a huge nose dive in every aspect - in dev time and quality until you end up with shit like Assassin's Creed Shadows and games like Perfect Dark and Fable just not coming out, despite being an insanely simple concept.

Indies started forming around smaller teams and had some very huge successes in the same space (Undertale, FNAF, Shovel Knight, etc) until you get to today where Expedition 33 destroys the game awards and huge studios take huge losses and start sweeping layoffs as even Microsoft and Sony start feeling the pressure to right size and Ubisoft busts out the all-white game directors for Assassin's creed.

 

[SmokelessFire]

Playing Rockstar games online In anything beyond a exploratory fashion, is extremely nigger coded

 

[cis mans burden]

"El problema es el capitalismo" sounds like what I'd say to make fun of Chavez lol

It strikes me as even funnier when this retard words in one of the most intensely capitalist industries in the world. Consooooomer products. Good thing AI is going to make it even easier to be indie, if the retards could also get over being butthurt about it.

 

[DickMain]

Learn to code.

 

[Wraithdolf the White]

Rookie numbers. I want to see a crash that makes '83 look like a corporate restructuring. I want to see shitlib and troon game devs jumping off bridges.

I came here to post this. They say some really nasty genocidal stuff against their customer. Enjoy the sewer grate in san fagcisco, chummers.

 

[PhoBingas]

I came here to post this. They say some really nasty genocidal stuff against their customer. Enjoy the sewer grate in san fagcisco, chummers.

I think game devs have gotten up there with the comics industry and the NHL for companies that hate their customers, especially in the last decade or so. They deserve the layoffs.

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

1/3 are laid off, but I bet only a small fraction of that will go on to do anything else in the industry, indie or otherwise. I also don't expect the larger developers to get better. Any time it looks that way it's always just in the marketing to mask they've still done less than the bare minimum and are just looking to keep you hooked for the time it takes your refund period to expire (see: Battlefield 6 for most recent example).

 

[Ignatius von Cistern]

Look guys, they'll never take Civ or Diablo from you. Just play those.

 

[Drunken Fox]

I'm not sure if WFH was the issue as much as just general bloat.

I have family who work in the professional graphics arts/games scene, and they've been WFH for years at this point.

Long before COVID, long before the games industry homogenized into "AAA gaming"?

There was already a big chunk of the workforce that would come to the office for meetings and pitches, but? Did all the "grunt" work, the designing and rendering from home on a tablet and mailed it in.

WFH just separated the wheat from the chaff and showed who actually produces work of value and who just takes a six figure salary to attend Zoom calls and remind everyone that the feelings of black lesbian amputees who suffer from agoraphobia have not been properly represented in the latest build.

Because every one of these AAA studios got fat off the one-two punch of COVID. Free PPP money and the non-organic increase in gaming from people being stuck at home and out of work making them think the promised "Modern Audience" had finally come out of their caves to buy woke slop.

Now that it's all over? They're realizing 75% of the people they hired to meet that demand did nothing and are no longer needed.

Nah. WFH is a big issue. Probably less for the artists and animators, but definitely for engineers and potentially designers. The biggest issue with WFH is ramping someone into a project, especially if the game is built using a custom engine (this is why there's a larger push to have everyone use Unreal). Artists definitely can WFH more. Their work tends to be more siloed and less dealing with engine wonkiness.

At the start of COVID I became remote at a job that I had already been at for a number of years. I thought it was great and I was a super high performer, despite not having to work as much per day. I left because I was underpaid, underpromoted, and was shown a lot of disrespect (it wasn't just me as the team was bleeding members), and I moved to another remote job. It has been a continuous nightmare ever since as it is not an easy project to work on and being remote meant that the ramp up... never really fully felt like it happened. This is something that I've found universally through all of my engineering friends as we spread out throughout the industry, WFH is great when you know what you're doing, but the second the project has become a mess (and they all do), or you are coming into something new, but is already established so you can't build it yourself, WFH becomes a hindrance.

 

[frozen_runner]

As someone who's Steam account could have probably been a used car, I have barely played anything in the last year and almost all of it was $10 indy crap. It doesn't hit the same, maybe I have built a tolerance but I feel like there is more baking soda in my crack lately. I bought Titanfall 2 for $2.50 and played the campaign the other night and was like "Wow shit was better." The story is generic and it was short but it was polished and the game play was super tight.

These days it's all so formulaic and cash driven or grind-y and void of content and RUSHED. Everything is so committee driven that it all just blends together. Nobody wants to take a chance on the niche audience and so they are all chasing the same vague mass appeal, making the same pastel looter shooter bullshit, open world slop and souls clones.

What about a realistic scuba simulator with real life locations and hazards? What about a 6DOF ship rescue, recovery, boarding crew game in the vein of Ship Breakers with the cutting and decompression but with hostiles, hostages, entry/exit trajectories. payloads, etc.? What about any number of management sims I can rattle off?...

I'm not going to say all that. But I will say Steam is filled with absolute trash along with the great games. A lot of it. I don't even bother with the discovery feed anymore.

 

[SITHRAK!]

the same cliques of diversity hires re-hiring each other from one failure to the next

Don’t forget hundreds of thousands of dollars being paid to shitlib grifters for ‘sensitivity readings’ and shit. Sweet Baby Inc, Sarkeesian’s little hustle and more.

Imagine paying someone six figures so they can ask “is there any way you could make any of these characters fat, black and/or lesbian?”

 

[Pentex]

Dev cycles that exceed the life cycles of console hardware.

Bloated budgets.

Bloated teams.

Bloated games.

Bloated prices.

Fetch quest/completionist filler.

Stripping gameplay and features.

Paywalling game features.

Shit storytelling.

The video games industry is damn near the death of Julius Caesar. All of the Seantors have had their chance to stick a knife in, but Brutus hasn't appeared to deliver the killing blow.