This has not been a good year for video games. It might look like it on the surface--some great games have been released, and industry mouthpieces will try to tell you everything is wonderful while pointing to commercials and cinematic trailers--but the truth is that 2023 has been defined by one thing: massive, industry-wide layoffs, at a scale I don't remember seeing even at the height of the global recessions in 2008.
It has been a blood-letting. No publisher has been safe, no series or platform. This is the part of the blog where I should be listing some prominent examples, but I don't think I can do it justice. The reason I'm writing this post in the first place is that there are too many to list. Too many to feel, to remember, to allow to register.
Under almost any other circumstance, in almost any other year, video game news websites would list every round of layoffs and/or studio closure as an individual news item. They would stand alone in the news cycle, be notable, something you could cite when it came time to talk about that game or that company.
In 2023, the layoffs have come in such volume and frequency that they stop being about people and studios and start feeling more like those videos you see every few years of a flood destroying a town in Central Europe. There goes the church (your favourite racing game studio), you murmur, as its roof tears off and is carried down past the town square. There goes the school (a successful indie studio purchased by a major publisher then shut down), as its wooden walls splinter and float past a row of houses.
As more and more of the town slips underwater, you stop noticing the buildings. All you can see is the water. Surging and unstoppable.
It's cruel because it’s dehumanizing. Every closure used to be a place where people came together to make video games. Every layoff is a person with a career, an expert responsible for your favourite thing about a game. Maybe they’re providing for loved ones, or they had to move across the country (or the world) to do it, and are now shit out of luck.
In many cases the axe falls not because of anything that company or developer did (or didn't do), but because someone in accounting at a publisher decided they weren't making quite enough money, or someone funding games thought they were suddenly "too risky", or some idiot made everyone work on a genre that was popular when the game was conceived but was dead by the time it was halfway through development.
This is what makes the news particularly numbing; the developers and studios affected are so often collateral damage. To take just one recent example, look what happened this week to League of Geeks, the creators of Armello. By all accounts LoG was a remarkable place to work, full of some of Australia's brightest minds in game development, but this year they had their legs cut out from under them by a downturn in international investment. Now half the company has been laid off.
And that's just one story. One among dozens, dozens among hundreds. To finally start listing some specific examples, this week has also seen layoffs at Codemasters, New World Interactive and TinyBuild. Last week it was Fishlabs and WETA Digital. The month before that it was Amazon, Kongregate, Humble Games, Digital Extremes, Free Radical and Ubisoft.
I had to look most of those up--handily/grimly catalogued at videogamelayoffs.com--because I wasn't sure if I could remember all of them off the top of my head. They come too thick and fast. All I see now is the flood. And I feel like shit because of that. We should all feel like shit because of that. Like I've said, these are all people, with lives and obligations and problems, and the absolute state of the video game industry in 2023 (and the wider global economy around it), has turned them into collective slosh.
It sucks that so many talented people are being thrown in the trash for things outside their control. It especially sucks that it is happening so often that it has become the defining vibe of the video games industry in 2023. I wish I had something more supportive to say, something constructive to offer here, but I don't. My heart goes out everyone. Fuck that flood, and the storm that brought it down.
