Game layoffs continue to slow down through early May | Amir Satvat

Game layoffs haven’t disappeared, but they have slowed down in 2025, according to data from game job champion Amir Satvat. It prompted him to write a LinkedIn post with the title, “2025 Games Layoffs Update: Is The Worst Behind Us?”

As of May 9, the games industry has experienced 2,705 layoffs this year, Satvat wrote. He said he used a Holt-Winters time series model trained on historicals and all of his community data since 2022.

With that approach, he said his forecast for the rest of 2025 (May 10-Dec 31) is 2,684 more layoffs. That would bring the full-year projected total to just 5,389, which is 45% lower than the game community’s initial 2025 forecast of 9,769, for now.

Why is the forecast so low?

He said the the model is built on everything he knows — not just historical daily cuts since 2022, but every single piece of data our community sees: Opening projections. Layoff announcements. User reports. Trends in studio activity. Millions of data points from thousands of conversations.

Mathematically, the second half of 2025 would have to repeat major Q1/Q2 events (like Microsoft’s and Sony’s mass cuts) to get anywhere close to the initial projection, at this point. And while more layoffs may happen, the statistical model sees no signals of enough events that large.

“And right now, all of it says the worst might be behind us, unless another massive round hits,” he wrote. “Let’s hope that doesn’t change.”

My own take is we did see some more surprise layoffs from EA related to its Respawn studio, and one thing that is hard to predict is when big companies give up on games and lay people off as a result. We also don’t know exactly what kind of effect AI is having on job growth right now. So I’ve grown to be skeptical of predictions of a turnaround. But if hiring comes back to offset the layoffs, that would be a great signal to people betting their livelihoods on gaming. Once again, this is useful data from Satvat, and no one else in the game industry is doing this.