Over 5,000 games industry workers have already lost their jobs in 2024

The number of games industry job losses announced in January is already more than half the total job losses in the entirety of 2023.

Technical artist Farhan Noor’s website, Video Games Layoffs, has been tracking confirmed games industry job cuts since the start of last year.

According to the site, an estimated total of 10,500 game industry workers lost their jobs in 2023. At the time of writing, the estimated total for 2024 on the same site currently stands at 3,770.

However, today’s news that Microsoft is laying off 1,900 staff from its video game division means that when the list is next updated, it will total at least 5,670 layoffs.

This means the total number of layoffs in 2024, as of January 25, has already reached 54% of 2023’s total layoffs.

It was revealed today that Microsoft is cutting around 8% of its overall gaming division, which has around 22,000 employees – a total of around 1,900 employees.

On Tuesday, Riot Games also confirmed that it was laying off around 530 staff, representing around 11% of all employees.

Earlier this month Unity also announced a plan to lay off 25% of its workforce, totalling 1,800 employees (and partly explaining why the total number is already so high this year).

According to a GDC survey, around a third of developers say they were impacted by layoffs at their workplace over a 12-month period.

Of 3,000 developers surveyed, 35% said they were impacted by layoffs during this period – 7% were personally laid off, a further 17% said colleagues in their department were laid off, and 11% said other teams or departments had layoffs.