Layoff Wave Pushes Nearly Half of Game Workers Toward Exiting Industry

Layoffs are doing more than trimming teams across games. A new Skillsearch survey found 44% of respondents have considered leaving the industry because of redundancies, a warning sign that the current cut cycle is starting to drain the future pipeline, not just the current payroll. In the UK, the picture was even starker, with 76% saying they either are or will be considering job hunting outside the industry in 2026.

Skillsearch’s 2026 Games & Immersive Salary and Satisfaction Report drew on 1,000 respondents across the UK, Europe, North America, APAC and MENA, with fieldwork running from November 12, 2025 to February 24, 2026. The report said the main drivers behind redundancies were reduced investor funding, budget cuts and a lack of projects. Only 35% of respondents said they or their studio had been unaffected by redundancies, while 28% said their studio had laid people off but they were not personally affected.

The survey also points to a workforce under strain even after people land elsewhere. Among respondents who had been laid off, 45% had already found new employment, but only 27% said they feel secure in that role. That gap matters for a business built on long production cycles and specialized know-how. When senior and mid-career developers conclude the sector is too unstable to stay in, studios lose the people who usually keep pipelines moving, mentor newer hires and carry hard-won institutional knowledge from one project to the next.

The most affected groups were art roles, senior roles, workers at companies with more than 250 employees and people with 10 or more years of experience. That mix suggests the cuts are landing hardest on the very people studios rely on to stabilize production, solve problems before they spill over and keep big projects from slipping. In practice, that means longer ramp-up times for new teams, more delays when experience walks out the door and a harder path for veteran developers trying to remain in games.

The warning lands in the middle of a wider industry reckoning. GDC’s 2025 State of the Game Industry report said 1 in 10 developers had been laid off in the past year. Its 2026 report said more than one in four respondents had been laid off in the past two years, half said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the previous 12 months, and two-thirds of respondents at AAA studios reported layoffs at their companies. The International Game Developers Association said more than 8,700 developers were affected by layoffs in 2024, while United Videogame Workers-CWA launched at GDC 2025 with demands for sustainable growth, advance notice before layoffs, better severance, recall rights and worker control over generative AI decisions, as it cited 10,500 jobs lost in 2023 and another 14,600 in 2024.