One-Third of US Video Game Industry Workers Were Laid Off Over the Last Two Years, GDC Study Reveals (variety.com) 35
An anonymous reader shares a report: One-third of U.S. video game industry workers say they were laid off over the past two years, according to a new survey conducted by the organizers behind the newly revamped Game Developers Conference (GDC). Based on responses from more than 2,300 gaming industry professionals, with surveys "customized for each participant group, ensuring that developers, marketers, executives, investors and others answered questions most relevant to them," the 2026 State of the Game Industry Report found that 33% of respondents in the U.S. were laid off in the past two years. AI use has grown to 36% of respondents, but sentiment has turned sharply negative: 52% now believe generative AI is harming the industry, compared to 30% last year and 18% in 2024. On the labor front, 82% of US respondents support unionization for game workers, and 62% said they're not in a union but interested in joining one. No respondents between 18 and 24 years old opposed unionization.
We'll only be able to afford to play Tux Racer (Score:2, Interesting)
Too late. We're installing a sycophant into the Federal Reserve. An economic depression that knocks the US out of the global economy for at least a decade is coming. We've chased immigrants, including technical workers, out of this country. It almost doesn't matter that the US is trying to curtail visas for skilled workers [nytimes.com], the demand for those visa is also plummeting.
If you want a reliable job in gaming, you need to pack your bags and leave the US. That's going to be your only option in the near future. Th
Re: We'll only be able to afford to play Tux Racer (Score:2)
Like the tide that lifts all boats. The American economy is the toilet that flushes the world economy.
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This time, probably. But it will be the last time that happens.
About to start their own businesses (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what I would do if I and 5 of my coworkers were fired from a high tech buiness.
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Steam is already saturated by low-quality cheap games. There are multiple strata of indie games, and the lowest stratum is by far the largest.
AI powered tools will make it even easier for the video-game equivalent of "garage bands" to churn out slop and try to make a buck on it on steam. But regardless of what that might mean for our ability to find good games on the platform, it also means that the overwhelming majority of indie game developers won't be able to make a living doing it. They will be lucky
Makes sense, why hasn't it happened? (Score:2)
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the aaa segment has also been saturated with minimum value for a while. i can't say what the impact of ai is/will be, it will likely be some, but i think the real underlying trend here is plain old market saturation. gaming has been going mainstream and soaring for more than two decades, covid provided an extra circumstantial boost that isn't there anymore and it seems the market is hitting its limits (combined with consumer confidence taking a hit). i would expect natural selection doing its thing now.
ai d
A little late. (Score:3)
Gondor lit the beacons before it was under siege, because to do so after is far, far too late.
For the IT industry to start speculating AFTER it has lost a third of its workforce is to start debating whether to light the beacons only after a third of the city is taken.
This is a crisis that has been expected for a very long time. Long enough for you to have experience in fighting the bean counters. Sorry, but this is a mess of your own making. In more ways than one.
1. AI is good at a few basic tasks, but it is not good at being innovative or fresh. Nor is it ever going to be capable of being so, because you can't have the future in the training set. So regurgitating a few simple themes repeatedly was never going to be in the interests of humans, only in the interests of accountants (most of whom seem to have used the daleks and cybermen as a training manual on conduct) and short-term profits. Accountants don't care if a company goes belly-up, they work many accounts, so short-term profits (even if it causes medium-term collapse) are all that matter.
2. AI cannot write decent code. How could it - it was trained on Stack Overflow and abandoned github projects. But this only matters if the humans bother themselves to write reliable code. You can replace one bug-ridden pile of carp with another without users caring too much.
3. AI cannot write tightly-optimised code. But, then, I doubt most humans ever bothered to learn that skill, when they could simply instruct the user to install more RAM and a beefier CPU.
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Most game developers can't write good code either. A friend used to write 3D drivers and had to put in various workarounds for the crappy code in so many games asking the driver to do really dumb things which slashed performance.
This is why these days they typically rely on the good developers writing engines that they license.
And then we have the numerous flops where developers decided pushing politics was more important than making a good game. If they were even capable of doing so in the first place.
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Every mid-level or higher studio will have at least one optimization person. You don't actually need a lot of them. Unreal's profiling tools are pretty decent, and a generic programmer can usually tackle the low-hanging fruit there. A lot of slow code is simple but unexpected stuff. For instance, Unreal's penalty for spawning an Actor is quite high, and you're generally discouraged from spawning a lot of them. If you fire a gun that uses projectile bullets, you may find the performance is bad. A simple pool
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Cool-sounding jobs not so cool (Score:2)
I've long thought that the cool-sounding jobs that you thought you wanted as a teenager tend to be the worst jobs. Video game designer/programmer is top of that list. It's been an industry with abysmal job security and low pay relative to skillset for a very long time.
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I've long thought that the cool-sounding jobs that you thought you wanted as a teenager tend to be the worst jobs.
When I was a kid, I dreamed about someday writing accounting applications.
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Tron was definitely influential [fandom.com]!
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Tron and the Apple 2+ launched my career.
But I think now we're heading more towards 2001 A Space Odyssey.
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No more death marches without overtime pay or stock options? How will programmers survive?
The problem isn't AI... (Score:3)
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Similar to the music and movie industry... (Score:2)
And the cycle continues (Score:4, Insightful)
Early games were made by people who loved games, and they made a lot of money
Then game studios got taken over by artless mercenaries who focused on increasing microtransactions, loot boxes and other sneaky ways to harvest revenue
Add to that consultants that mutated games into political statements and it's easy to see why the industry is in trouble
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Games, like movies and music and most other art forms, have been political for decades. The problem is mostly the second thing: the mercenaries and bad CEOs.
There's plenty of 'politics' even in fun movies, but you don't notice, because they're good. Make a bad game and everything sticks out like a sore thumb, and then it often gets blamed on the 'politics'. Most of the games that were 'ruined' by the political message would have been bad no matter what, because the devs weren't given the creative space to d
the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
the problem is industry consolidation. Why have two dev teams making two games when one game will cannibalize sales for other game you are making. These layoffs are the promised efficiency of mergers and acquisitions. Much better to just make one game and sell twice as many copies.
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If you look at the game crash of 1983, you notice the same game being released over and over in increasingly bad form due to a bunch of people trying just to make money at it without understanding why people buy the game is career suicide. The game industry has ALWAYS been extremely volatile. I professionally worked in it 3 months. I contracted more like 6ish (off-and-on, that's paid time).
But yeah, when I hear stuff like Sims 5 isn't in developement because they can keep milking Sims 4 despite the game hav
New games suck (Score:2)
New games from big studios are kinda shitty. There are a few standout franchises that stand out and push the whole medium forward, but even those are starting lose their luster.
Gaming is also competing with itself in a really big way. Yesterday I saw Rockstars "Manhunt" on sale on steam for like 3$
I almost scooped it up, but remembered I have the actual game and can just emulate the system and run game on a PC with less hassle than dealing with modern launchers and bullshittery.
There's decades of amazing ga