Gaming’s Contract Workers Are Being Devastated, Too: ‘Industry’s Cooked’
Kotaku | 23.07.2026 00:30
If you had asked me in 2022 whether or not I’d still be writing about a seemingly endless onslaught of games industry mass layoffs in 2026, I’d have been confidently wrong in saying no. Yet here we are, four years after stories like this began to come out, and there’s no end in sight. We have rough numbers that barely capture the devastation: some 8500 in 2022, over 10,000 in 2023, over 14,000 in 2024, an optimistic-looking 5300 in 2025, but we’re already up to 4600 in 2026. And that’s the numbers we’ve been told about. Nevermind the many, many more individuals who were left out of those counts in quieter layoffs, or ones where major companies successfully avoided disclosing actual numbers.
