More than 10,000 people have been laid off
Here's why there have been so many layoffs in video games
The video game industry hit a grim milestone in 2023 as the year ended with more than 10,000 layoffs affecting programmers, quality assurance workers, sound designers, and artists—along with countless other people and job titles. But the new year did nothing to stop the layoffs. Just days into 2024, more than 2,000 video game industry workers were laid off from game engine maker Unity and streaming platform Twitch — and in the months that followed, that number continued to rise. Now, the industry has reached another unfortunate landmark event: Just six months into the year, the total number of layoffs from the video game industry in 2024 has surpassed 2023's total by just over 10,000.
The numbers, for both 2023 and 2024, are conservative, community-counted estimates from tech artist Farhan Noor's layoff tracker and from Polygon's own count; there are likely well over 10,000 people laid off from the video game industry worldwide. While the data isn't exact, it tells a devastating story—as CEOs lament an economic downturn, the workers who make games continue to suffer the consequences of management's decisions. Of course, video game companies are still hiring, and some, like Nintendo, continue to expand their employee pools. While hiring and firing cycles aren't necessarily uncommon in the video game industry — The Conversation rightly called it a "long-standing structural issue" where companies ramp up hiring during production and then lay off workers post-launch — the scale of the current situation is unprecedented.
Even Geoff Keighley, the video game industry's unofficial hype man, could no longer ignore reality: Keighley briefly paused the glitz and glamor of his Summer Game Fest broadcast to acknowledge the layoffs and studio closings.
