10 Days Into 2024 And 2300+ Video Game Layoffs Have Been Announced

Within the last few years, video game industry layoffs have unfortunately become more commonplace. In 2023, we saw . When the dust had settled, at 6,000 jobs across publishers, developers, and other video game related companies had happened. Sadly, it appears 2024 will outpace that, if the first few weeks of the year are any indication.

Most folks didn’t expect 2024 to be much better, but I’m not sure anyone was ready for it to be possibly worse—yet this year has kicked off with a string of big and small layoffs signaling that the corporate bloodletting rituals aren’t ending anytime soon. So is going to try and track all of 2024’s layoffs as they happen.

Hopefully, we don’t have to update this post that much. the first round of video game layoffs (that we know of) happened at VR games developer Archiact. The company, known for its VR port, announced on social media that it had laid off an unspecified number of staff. “We are working with these individuals to offset this difficult transition as much as possible, including through reverse recruiting,” said the studio in its announcement post.

This technically happened in late 2023, but was reported and confirmed on January 5, 2024. 19 people were cut from the studio. The layoffs were mostly QA and production roles as well as some non UK employees. On January 8, 2024, reported the first truly massive round of layoffs for the year as Unity confirmed that it planned to at the company.

This is reportedly the largest round of layoffs in the software company’s history and it will be completed by the end of March. that Twitch was preparing to lay off 500 employees by the end of January. This is about 35% of its total staff. The Amazon owned video game streaming website previously in March and later in October.

As of January 10, 2024, at least 2,319 people have been (or will be) laid off this year. The video game industry is bigger and makes more money than movies and music combined, bringing in . It’s also an industry that becomes riskier and more expensive each year as and , leading to a situation where even a single flop can sink a studio or publisher.

And the whole industry is also in unions to help protect its millions of workers when things don’t work out as planned. Until then, corporate greed, industry consolidation, and poor leadership will likely continue to cost thousands of people their jobs as we’ve seen at Twitch and Unity..