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You may have heard about massive layoffs hitting the tech space this year, but let’s talk about employees within the gaming industry who are facing similar challenges.
Whether it’s game developers or people who work at companies that help shape the online gaming culture, 2024 has been a painful year for the gaming realm.
The big headline-maker this week is PlayStation, which let go of 900 staffers despite having the best-selling console with some of the most popular games on the market. They join more than 6,000 workers who have been laid off in the gaming space already this year, per Kotaku’s ongoing roundup.
But PlayStation isn’t alone.
5 gaming companies with layoffs in 2024
Xbox
First up is Microsoft Gaming, one of PlayStation’s rival console manufacturers. The folks who make the Xbox console and all of its games had to say goodbye to 1,900 colleagues in late January.
“The people who are directly impacted by these reductions have all played an important part in the success of Activision Blizzard, ZeniMax and the Xbox teams, and they should be proud of everything they’ve accomplished here,” Microsoft Gaming head Phil Spencer wrote in an internal email at the time. “We are grateful for all of the creativity, passion and dedication they have brought to our games, our players and our colleagues.”
While it’s true that the Xbox Series X and S consoles haven’t been massive hits in terms of raw unit sales numbers, it’s still disheartening to see Microsoft cut so many jobs fewer than six months after completing its $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Twitch
Twitch doesn’t develop games, but one can argue that the streaming platform makes games by virtue of giving exposure to titles that may not get massive followings without leveraging the influential powers of popular streamers.
“Over the last year, we’ve been working to build a more sustainable business so that Twitch will be here for the long run and throughout the year we have cut costs and made many decisions to be more efficient,” CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post at the time. “Unfortunately, despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business.”
Twitch terminated about 500 workers in early January.
Unity
Unity is another company that doesn’t directly develop games. Instead, it makes foundational software for game developers. The Unity engine has been popular with independent (and otherwise) developers for years, acting as the technical basis for huge games like Among Us and Beat Saber.
“We are … reducing the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability,” CEO Jim Whitehurt told employees when the layoffs were announced, per Reuters.
About 1,800 Unity workers lost their jobs in January.
Riot
Riot makes some of the most popular games on the planet, including League of Legends and Valorant. It even just announced an exciting-looking new fighting game called 2XKO.
“We asked leaders to make tradeoffs in the things their teams are working on. We rolled out hiring slowdowns, and in some cases hiring freezes. We put an emphasis on controlling costs while strengthening our revenue growth. All of which has without a doubt been tough for our teams,” CEO Dylan Jadeja wrote in the blog post. “As I’ve dug in with leaders across Riot, it’s become clear to all of us that these changes aren’t enough.”
In company blog post published in January, Riot confirmed that more than 500 employees would lose their jobs as part of a cost-cutting effort.
Discord
Discord is responsible for the more-or-less default text and voice chat client for gamers. Xbox and PlayStation consoles have Discord support and pretty much anyone who plays games has an account with the service.
Still, in January, Discord laid off 17 percent of its staff, or around 170 people.
“This is what largely drove the decision to reduce the size of our workforce,” Discord CEO Jason Citron said. “While difficult, I am confident this will put us in the best position to continue building a strong and profitable business that delivers amazing products for our users and supports our mission for years to come.”
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The video games industry is laying off workers by the thousands and it’s not even March yet.
