I've Never Seen It This Bad:' Game Developers Explain the Huge Layoffs Hitting Riot, Epic, and More

[Gamernyc78]

'I've Never Seen It This Bad:' Game Developers Explain the Huge Layoffs Hitting Riot, Epic, and More - IGN

I spoke to over 40 game developers whose companies had been impacted by layoffs in the last year. They shared with me the explanations companies gave them for what was causing the sudden loss of their livelihood, but they also told me why those explanations didn’t always seem to match reality.

www.ign.com

But it isn’t the entire story. Layoffs like the ones at Ascendant don’t fit in with the pandemic narrative. And with over 10,000 layoffs in 2023, and over 6,000 more in 2024, simply saying that companies got a little too eager during a global pandemic is starting to sound overly trite. Even executives are starting to sense they can’t rely on this explanation. In Riot Games’ public statement explaining the reasoning behind layoffs affecting 530 individuals, or 11% of all of Riot Games, Riot admitted that the decisions that led to these cuts were made long before the pandemic began:

Since 2019, we’ve made a number of big bets across the company with the goal of making it better to be a player. We jumped headfirst into creating new experiences and broadening our portfolio, and grew quickly as we became a multi-game, multi-experience company — expanding our global footprint, changing our operating model, bringing in new talent to match our ambitions, and ultimately doubling the size of Riot in just a few years.

Today, we’re a company without a sharp enough focus, and simply put, we have too many things underway. Some of the significant investments we’ve made aren’t paying off the way we expected them to. Our costs have grown to the point where they’re unsustainable, and we’ve left ourselves with no room for experimentation or failure – which is vital to a creative company like ours. All of this puts the core of our business at risk.

In this letter, Riot publicly admitted a problem that's been quietly festering across the entire games industry: there’s something deeply wrong with how video game executives are choosing to spend their money, and rank and file developers keep paying the price for it.

For this piece, I spoke to over 40 game developers whose companies had been impacted by layoffs in the last year. They shared with me the explanations companies gave them for what was causing the sudden loss of their livelihood, but they also told me why those explanations didn’t always seem to match reality. While the details in each story vary, almost all of them painted a picture of the games industry as an increasingly volatile environment fraught with high costs, growing risks, and increasing volatility. And often, developers say, those in charge of navigating that precarious environment have little regard for the hundreds of developers who pay the price when things go wrong.