45,000 Gaming Jobs Lost Since 2022
“The gaming industry fired 45,000 people in four years and then wondered why nobody wants to make games anymore.”
Sally's not done with you yet.
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.
Sally's Take
Forty-five thousand jobs. That's not a correction. That's not a market adjustment. That's an industry-wide purge. Since 2022, the gaming sector has systematically gutted its own workforce while posting record revenues and announcing billion-dollar acquisitions. The GDC 2026 survey puts it in black and white: one in three US game workers has been laid off in the past two years. One in three. If any other industry lost a third of its workforce in 24 months, there would be congressional hearings. Gaming gets a shrug and a 'well, budgets were too high.'
The root cause is simple and ugly. The industry over-hired during the pandemic boom, spent recklessly on projects that didn't pan out, and now the bill is due. Consoles are selling less than the previous generation. Games are competing with TikTok, streaming, and every other form of entertainment for attention spans that keep shrinking. So instead of adjusting strategy, executives chose the path of least resistance: fire the people who actually make the games. Senior developers with decades of experience, junior artists who just broke in, entire QA departments. All gone so the quarterly earnings call sounds better.
The worst part is the industry's complete refusal to learn from it. Every major publisher that laid off hundreds of people in 2023 did it again in 2024. And again in 2025. And here we are in 2026, still watching studios close and teams dissolve while CEOs collect bonuses for 'operational efficiency.' The people who greenlit the unsustainable spending are still employed. The people who did the actual work are not. That's not an industry in transition. That's an industry eating itself, and the 45,000 people who lost their livelihoods are the receipt.
Think your work can survive this?
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.
What Actually Happened
- •Over 45,000 gaming jobs have been eliminated since 2022 across the global industry
- •GDC 2026 survey data shows 1 in 3 US game workers were laid off in the past two years
- •Console sales are trending below previous generation numbers, squeezing publisher margins
- •Games increasingly compete with short-form video, streaming, and other entertainment for audience attention
Who Got Burned
Forty-five thousand developers, artists, designers, QA testers, producers, and support staff who built the games that generated the profits that funded the bonuses of the executives who fired them.
Silver Lining
The indie scene is absorbing displaced talent at record rates, and smaller studios are forming from the ashes of corporate layoffs. Some of gaming's best work has historically come from developers who got fed up with the machine and built something on their own terms.
Your turn. Drop something.
Drop a URL, screenshot, or file and Sally will give you the honest truth.