Whenever there are games media layoffs these days--and really, what day aren't there any--there's a certain cadence to the news. Those with their ears to the ground, or anyone following the affected writers on social media, hear about things first because a site's owners are usually too cowardly to make a public announcement. Then websites like this one report the news to a wider audience.
Then, outside of the news cycle, there's the wash. The tweets and Linkedin messages that come after. I've seen so many of them over the years that there's a definite pattern to them, all of them opening with something like "my time at GamesPub has sadly come to an end after my Slack access was removed without notice, and everything I ever wrote for the site has been deleted", and all of them ending with some variation of "I'm now open to opportunities", or "please consider me for any openings".
As someone who left the commercial side of this industry very recently, I know how important those closing lines can be. If you suddenly find yourself without a job, and you've been doing that job for years, you naturally want to keep doing that job! But just as we wrote about recently with game developers, when your industry is contracting as rapidly as games media is, there just aren't enough jobs to go around.
Whole networks are collapsing or being gobbled up by larger ones, and even the few big sites left routinely shed staff, to the point where it feels like there are more writers out of work than there are working. For the 30 people laid off at Gamurs this week, for example, what's out there? Not 30 paying jobs in games media, that's for sure. There are maybe a handful of openings worldwide, each of which probably has hundreds of applicants. Which is why those parting messages from laid off staff are always so heartbreaking: they're not being laid off from a job, but often from their career.
This contraction not only massively impacts those laid off, it has knock-on effects on the sites you can still read and the people who work there. Experienced leadership in the field is being thinned as callously as younger writers, while pathways for fresh talent are being bottlenecked because the few jobs that are out there inevitably go to more experienced, displaced writers.
This is maddening for the toll this takes on individual writers, but it's exponentially so considering how we as an industry got here. It's usually always the same story: inept ownership over-commits to an industry, sets unrealistic growth targets, misunderstands the field and the medium or, in the most explosive cases, it's all of the above. And when things inevitably go bad, it's not the bone-headed owners being "re-adjusted" or seeing their jobs "restructured". It is, like it always is, the workers paying the price.
Games media is in many respects a pretty shitty job, at least these days. It tends to be underpaid, full of abuse, exploits young writers and subjects most to the soul-crushing drudgery of posting SEO and algorithm-friendly garbage. Yet writers persist, if not for the love of writing then for the love of the medium and the hopes that someone out there appreciates what they've written.
And those are the challenges facing a stable job! Throw in the uncertainty and anxiety over your position at a more perilous site--or even entire network--and you can see how much of a knife's edge the entire medium of professional, written games coverage is. It's no wonder there's a pipeline of writers fleeing to games development; the latter might be an industry on fire, but when your own is already engulfed in flames, why not?
Everyone laid off from any job deserves better, but I think--and this is given my own experiences of course--being laid off from a games writing job because your owner is bad hits especially hard. Most of these sites were successful for their scale, with loyal readerships, so I can only hope that at some point in the future we can stop writing about how much this all sucks for affected writers and start writing about sites, networks, and owners who actually know what they’re doing.
To everyone who has been laid off this week, last week or any week and found new work in the space: I'm happy you got to keep doing what you love. But for the many more who haven't been able to return to games media, I at least hope you've found some kind of happiness working somewhere safer, more stable and that (probably) pays better.
