For a solid 30 months — perhaps the worst in gaming history — there have been more layoffs than hiring in gaming. That may be ending.
Amir Satvat, the game job resource champion who is bringing transparency to game jobs, said in a new post that he believes we have reached breakeven between hiring and layoffs in games in January, 2025. This is a big deal, as in the past 2.5 years, the game industry laid off 34,000 people.
In a post on LinkedIn, Satvat wrote the chart above is a 6-week trailing sum of layoffs in the games industry. At its peak in the first quarter of 2024, it exceeded 6,000. But since the fourth quarter of 2024, that number has remained below 700.
“For a while, I’ve said I hoped we would hit breakeven, where six-week trailing hiring outpaces six-week trailing layoffs,” Satvat said. “Initially, I predicted this for 12/2024, then adjusted to 1/2025. I now believe we reached breakeven this month. That doesn’t mean it’s permanent, but hiring velocity is trending upward.”
Satvat tracks the velocity using an individual tracker on every role in his games jobs workbook, monitoring how long positions stay open, which roles move, and when they close.
Satvat has been trying to figure out for a while how many people actually work in core development and publishing worldwide.
“To answer this, I took a bottom-up approach, analyzing 3,100 companies in our games jobs workbook and estimating employee counts based on the best available data. I also ran a median and statistical distribution analysis to estimate what percentage of employees at a given studio size typically hold open roles,” Satvat wrote.
A key takeaway: Across all 3,100 companies he tracks, the median ratio of open roles to total employees in games companies is 3.2%.
The final result? He can estimate there are 243,000 direct employees in video games worldwide. Other numbers suggest that the numbers are in the 300,000 to 350,000 range. For now, Satvat believes that includes indirect employment as well.
Why does the accurate count matter? It enables a more accurate, comprehensive model to assess hiring velocity, he said.
Right now, Satvat estimates that about 13,500 people, annualized, are hired per year in core video games. At the height of COVID, he estimated annualized hiring surpassed 25,000.
This is why hiring odds are so tough — 13,500 annual hires compete against the un/underemployed portion of 35,000 laid-off workers, and tens of thousands of new graduates, and career switchers from other industries. It’s not a lot of jobs, especially when you consider that’s for all geographies and internal hires.
“Pulling it all together: I anticipate around 10,000 layoffs in 2025. But if hiring velocity stays above that — an entirely achievable outcome — 2025 could be a net positive year for hiring, even if only slightly,” Satvat wrote.
This aligns with his long-held estimate of a recovery that takes three to five years. If layoffs return to pre-2023 levels (800-2,500 per year) and hiring remains strong, the industry could recover 35,000 lost jobs at a pace of 10,000+ hires per year, he wrote.
Satvat has helped close to 3,000 people get jobs through his game job resources, and he was honored for that with the first-ever Game Changers award at The Game Awards in December. (See his acceptance speech in the video here).
By day, he works in business development at Tencent, and he does this work on game jobs on the side for no personal profit. I’ll be doing a panel on transparency in game jobs with Satvat at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March. And Satvat will be a speaker at our GamesBeat Summit 2025 event on May 19-20 in Los Angeles.
