Sony just closed two studios: Firewalk (the developer behind the stillborn Concord) and mobile dev Neon Koi. That's somewhere around a couple hundred people laid off.

Ubisoft Is Discontinuing XDefiant in 2025, San Francisco and Osaka Studios Shutting Down Amid Major Layoffs - IGN

Didn't that just start this year?

It's probably because I'm not much of an FPS guy, but I never heard of XDefiant until the news of its cancellation broke.

Yep...and at first it had mixed reviews but at it's height, nearly a million players on first day but after that started losing players...alot. I personally think these Devs who put out a game based on 100% PvP are way overestimating the draw of players. We've seen Concord, now XDefiant, some others in the past. I read a bitr on a small article on players comments on XDefiant and said there was little upgrading class and weapons for one. I think Studios/Devs are looking at the quickest, fastest way to make $$$$ with least amount of time and resources involved and then slap a lot of stuff to buy in a store hoping the best.
IGN has a long article with full statements...... Ubisoft Is Discontinuing XDefiant in 2025, San Francisco and Osaka Studios Shutting Down Amid Major Layoffs - IGN

Something familiar about your link...

My son has been searching for even the most basic of intro video game jobs after getting his VG Design/Development degree from Full Sail and he can't even get an interview anywhere. He has sent in countless applications.

Oh dang. I'm sorry that sucks. Not a great time to try to get in to the Video Game industry I'm sure.

He can always just make his own game in his spare time. The guy who created Stardew Valley made a game by himself that started out as a demo to get a job in the gaming industry and he's made over $100 million from that game now.

That is one positive aspect of the VG industry. It is set up to still be possible to make it as an independent, even single, developer. In the independent market the cream still rises to the top.

There is a glut of recent graduates within that field and it is extremely competitive regardless.

My son graduated in April with a degree is Computer Science with a concentration in Game Programming. He was tapped by the faculty to be the producer of their senior thesis game (a paid position) and luckily that lasted a few months after graduation as they wrapped things up before launching it on Steam.

Once that wound down, it was another few months before he got full-time contract work with a small independent studio with contacts he had from an alumni and they like him and have moved him from side projects to their main title (they create VR games). So things are good for him right now, and the hope is that he moves from contract to salary in early 2025, but I have admonished him to live frugally and save, save, save. The industry is soooo volatile.

My college buddy has worked in the game industry since 1998, and in his 25 year career he's worked for 9 different studios in three different countries and taught as an adjunct at two different institutions.

The industry is tough and not for the faint of heart. There has to be a deep love there.

Good luck to your son.

No offense to my son but he isn't that talented.

DAAAAAD!!! Come ON!!!

Although meant as a funny sketch, It's sadly pretty close to reality.

Phoenix Labs (Dauntless; Fae Farm) laid off the majority of their staff.

Ubisoft closed their Leamington studio (formerly FreeStyle Games of DJ Hero fame)and cut staff at Dusseldorf, Stockholm, and Reflections. 185 jobs cut overall.

I think this is the blowback from trying to make every game a "live service game." They think every game is going to be Fortnite or GTA Online. Sorry, there are only so many consumers and hours in a day. The market can't support 5,000 live service titles. They all saw their dreams of "recurring revenue" dashed before their eyes. Of course, it's the developers that suffer instead of the idiotic C-Suite that makes these terrible decisions.

It's a gamble. All they need is popular streamers to start playing, then the game will blow up. It also helps when the games are good, like Marvel Rivals.

It helps when the games are good but the license, I'm sure, helps tremendously for visibility.

But moving to live service games is kind of a reaction to development costs and trying to recoup that, I think.

Let's also not forget NFT games. I'm sure that trap has also cost some unfortunate programmers their jobs because some exec thought it was a sure fire win.

It still blows my mind how quickly game companies jumped on the NFT bandwagon. Execs were still saying it would be a major part of their future as everyone else was watching the market crash to the ground.

I mean, they're desperate for new revenue streams, and they have to jump on the bandwagon early because man it takes a looooong time to make a game these days.

Circana's Mat Piscatella on Bluesky:

I don't understand that graph. I think it's missing a label or something?

But I understand the sentiment. This is the next, and biggest challenge of the video game industry. The final boss if you will. These games that defy consoles, or generations. These are the games that the next generation are playing My 12 year old's console of choice is Roblox. It doesn't matter what she's playing it on. There are an almost infinite amount of devices she can play it on. And most importantly she can play with other people. I feel like this younger generation might not have the same in person connections so they seek out virtual connections and it means a lot more than the game itself.

I think Nintendo has tapped success and will still be successful. Their IP is second to none and they've been able to keep costs down. But I think almost any other studio is in trouble. Especially the AAAs. Consoles may not be here for many more generations.

To me It's a bit sad. It's almost like a dumbing down of video games. Not to insult any of the more casual games but it's not like it was before. The artistry and effort put into AAA titles seem like a lot of it is gone to waste.

Eh, I've said it before, but the industry cries poverty and that they need to raise the price of games yet more people than ever are playing video games (into adulthood even) and in general the industry is making a lot of money. And there is innovation/creativity buried in there, even if we don't always go out of our way to seek it out (or buy them at full price). The money is shifting, of course, and a lot of us are the old guys who don't want to play F2P games and/or recognize how damaging the monetization of them are (since some of it is glorified gambling AND targeted to kids).

I get it (or I'm pretty sure I get it!), but I'm also a weirdo who spends a lot of time visualizing data and making graphs in Excel for work.

Basically, it's showing that if you ranked games by the most-played to the least-played, the top handful of titles are capturing a massive, massive percentage of players, and it trails off quickly. And while that's expected behavior in a hit-driven medium, what's unexpected (for anyone who doesn't follow the industry, anyway) is just how disproportionate it is. It's not just "first there are the blockbusters, then a bunch of strong performers, then a large number of modest-sized successes, then indies, yadda yadda."; it's basically a very, very small handful of titles that most everyone is playing, and then there's...y'know, everything else.

It's an unavoidable consequence of the blockbuster-ization of gaming. Everything has to be bigger and more of a spectacle than the thing before it. But the more money you spend, the more risk-averse you're likely to be, given how high the stakes are. So there's a lot of iterating and recycling based on previous successes, with a lot of the trailblazing happening in the indie scene and from more core gameplay-oriented companies like Nintendo.