If folks were hoping that the bloodbath of layoffs in tech and the gaming industry would trickle to a close after 2023 ended, think again. Several more companies have confirmed job cuts, including Dead By Daylight studio Behaviour Interactive, and Lords of the Fallen’s CI Games, as a new developer survey finds that last year, 35% of devs worked for companies where layoffs happened.
The rough cuts continue, with studios and companies like Twitch and Discord now citing the now-common reason of ambitious growth attempts and related overhiring as reasons for letting employees go in order to restructure.
CI Games laid off 10% of its workforce across all departments, including Hexworks, which made Lords of the Fallen, Underdog, responsible for the game Sniper Ghost Warrior, along with most of the studio’s marketing team. CI Games confirmed its layoffs to GamesIndustry.biz and it is estimated there are around 15-20 people affected.
Behaviour Interactive confirmed its own round of layoffs, noting that about 45 people have been let go at its Montreal studio. These layoffs affected different departments and the company confirmed to Kotaku that these employees “represented less than 3% of our total workforce”.
Meanwhile, a new survey out covering 2023 gives a picture of the pain in the industry. Among those surveyed by Informa, which organizes the Game Developers Conference, were more than 3,000 developers. Among this group, surveyed last October, about 35% of respondents had been impacted in some way by layoffs at their company, with 7% being laid off themselves, 17% having colleagues laid off, and 11% having layoffs hit their company in some way. 22% of QA developers surveyed had been laid off in the past year. with this survey having been done in October, it does not count those who have been let go between October and the end of the year, which would likely skew these numbers up.
