The gaming industry suffered more than 9 thousand layoffs in 2023
In 2023, the gaming industry experienced about 9 thousand layoffs. This data came from technical artist Farhan Noor, who has been tracking all the layoffs since the beginning of the year on videogamelayoffs.com, reports VGC.
The largest number of layoffs occurred at Unity, which reduced its staff by 1165 employees over the year. Next comes ByteDance, which laid off 1000 employees from its Nuverse subsidiary. They are followed by Embracer Group with 964 layoffs, Epic Games with 830, and Amazon with 715.
Among the companies that also made staff reductions during the year are XBOX, PlayStation, CD Projekt Red, Ubisoft, Blizzard, Riot Games, TakeTwo, BioWare, and others.
Interestingly, as of October, Farhan Noor reported that the gaming industry suffered more than 6,000 layoffs, which means that over the past two months, gaming companies have laid off about 3,000 more employees.
The most recent layoffs took place at Embracer Group, where the company closed the Free Radical Design studio and laid off about 80 employees.
Overall, 2023 turned out to be a terrible year for industry workers, with news of new closures and layoffs appearing almost every week. In an interview with GameIndustry, Kantan Games CEO Serkan Toto said the following:
“In gaming, the significance of ‘efficiency’ has risen dramatically over the last 18 months. There is a much higher sense of urgency now to save costs and run slimmer organisations. The pressure is on for game industry CEOs to pull out the hammer and handle the biggest cost block of them all, namely staff. And this is what we have seen in 2023.”