Mass redundancies in the video game industry, with thousands of developers losing their jobs, have led to a record surge in workers joining unions, organisers have told the Observer.
The fledgling Game Workers branch of the IWGB union saw its membership jump by almost half between December 2022 and December 2023 as job cuts worsened in the sector, including at the studios behind bestselling games such as Fifa, Skyrim and The Witcher.
In October 2023 alone, membership jumped by 12%, a month after Epic, the developer of Fortnite, announced it was cutting hundreds of jobs as the studio was “spending way more money than we earn”.
Last week, a poll of more than 3,000 workers in the industry found that 35% of developers said they or a colleague had been affected by the cuts.
The UK has Europe’s biggest video game workforce, with the industry contributing £5bn to the UK economy each year. But studios and publishers, both in the UK and around the world, are now making cutbacks to compensate for an underwhelming growth after a pandemic-driven boom for video games failed to continue. That has only been worsened by the economic downturn and inflation.
Announced cuts at games studios worldwide suggest at least 10,500 staff lost their jobs last year, but given that dozens of the 170 companies involved did not reveal the number of staff affected, the true figure is likely to be significantly higher.
Globally, those cuts included the gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA), which is behind major series such as Fifa, Battlefield and The Sims. Other big names in the industry, including Bethesda, Activision Blizzard and CD Projekt RED, were also badly affected.
Ukie, the UK’s main video games industry body, claims that around 900 of an estimated 11,100 job losses were roles based in the UK, equivalent to more than one in 30 of all those employed by the sector in the UK.
“It’s felt like a deluge of redundancies in the past five or six months. It just keeps coming and coming,” said Austin Kelmore, chair of the IWGB Game Workers branch. “And with this wave, I’ve seen people saying ‘we need to join unions’. Our membership went through the roof. We had the largest growth of new members in any month in our five-year history at the end of last year.”
The union was first formed five years ago amid growing concerns among video games workers over precarious working conditions, endemic sexism at certain studios and constant excess overtime (a practice known as the “crunch”).
The pace of job losses seems unlikely to slow as at least 17 studios have already announced plans for further redundancies affecting thousands of employees.
In one case, Unity, a video game software firm that makes the engine used as a base for many of the world’s most popular games, including Among Us and Cuphead, announced it would be cutting off 25% of its workforce, or some 1,800 employees.
“It has been difficult to hear of the job losses in the video games sector over the recent few months,” said Ukie co-CEO Daniel Wood. “Our analysis suggests this is a rebalancing following successive years of significant growth during the pandemic.
“We continue to work hard to ensure the UK remains a great place to start and scale up games businesses, and we urge the government to use the budget to create the conditions needed for games businesses to grow.”
