If you only follow trailers and release dates, gaming looks like it’s thriving. If you follow employment news, it looks like it’s constantly in crisis. In late 2025, that contradiction has become impossible to ignore and it’s reshaping how developers talk, organize, and plan their careers.
A majority mood shift: union interest is now mainstream
One of the most striking data points this year came from GDC’s 2025 Game Industry Salary Report coverage. GameDeveloper.com reported that 64% of surveyed U.S. game workers support unionization, and 56% (not currently in a union) said they’re interested in joining one.
That’s not a fringe movement. That’s a majority sentiment, and it’s a sign that instability has crossed a threshold. People don’t usually organize at scale when they feel secure.
The layoffs aren’t just happening they’re becoming trackable “weather”
Layoffs used to arrive as shocking headlines. Now they arrive as a rolling tally. A layoff tracker site summarized an estimated ~3,563 layoffs in 2025 (at the time its page was crawled), presenting job cuts as a year-long running metric rather than a rare event.
Even if you treat crowd-sourced tracking as approximate, the bigger point stands: the community now expects layoffs often enough that it has created infrastructure to measure them.
Splash Damage: a case study in how quickly stability can vanish
The “consultation process” news around Splash Damage shows how this feels on the ground. Kotaku described the long-running UK studio entering a company-wide consultation likely to lead to layoffs and uncertainty. Other coverage framed it as affecting all staff and coming after previous changes in ownership structure.
This is the modern pattern: project shifts + funding realities + publisher strategy changes can flip a studio from “shipping soon” to “restructuring” fast.
Why this keeps happening (even when games sell)
There are several forces colliding:
- AAA cost inflation: bigger teams, longer cycles, higher risk.
- Live-service expectations: many studios staffed up chasing recurring revenue, then discovered most live-service attempts don’t hit escape velocity.
- Portfolio cleanup: publishers cutting projects that don’t look like category leaders.
- Capital tightening: investors demanding efficiency and predictable returns.
Layoffs aren’t always a sign a studio made a bad game. They’re often a sign the business model is wobbling.
Unions are also about predictability, not just pay
Union conversations in games are often reduced to salary fights. But the “why now” energy is also about stability: severance, notice periods, crunch rules, transparency in role changes, and the ability to contest arbitrary restructures.
The GDC numbers suggest that a large share of workers want the option to join because they don’t trust the current system to treat them fairly during shocks.
What this changes for players (yes, players)
Players feel industry labor conditions indirectly:
- Games take longer.
- Sequels get safer.
- Risky new IP becomes rarer.
- Patches ship later because teams are smaller.
- Community support degrades when studios lose experienced staff.
The “why is everything delayed?” question is often a labor question.
The next phase: labor news becomes product news
In 2026, expect labor dynamics to show up more in mainstream game coverage. Why? Because players are increasingly aware that their favorite worlds are built by people working under real constraints and because unionization efforts are reaching scale where they become unavoidable headlines.
Even if unionization outcomes differ by country and company, the direction is clear: developers are looking for collective leverage in a business that has normalized instability.
And that may end up being one of the most important “games news” stories of all: not what gets announced on stage, but what kind of industry exists behind the stage lights.
