When it rains it pours, and it has been raining nonstop for workers in the videogame and related media industries lately.
IGN reported April 29th that EA (Electronic Arts)—the game developer-publisher conglomerate responsible for Battlefield, BioWare’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, and such cuturally resonant, market-transcending titles as Madden NFL Football and EA FC (formerly FIFA)—laid off between 300 and 400 people.
These job losses include 100 at EA’s Respawn Entertainment, the studio responsible for the beloved mech-shooter franchise Titanfall (whose newest sequel has been cancelled thanks to the layoffs), the Star Wars Jedi series, and the Oscar-winning Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. Another popular Star Wars title, Zero Company, barely survived last year’s Respawn job cuts, which saw 700 workers put on the chopping block.
Gaming industry layoffs became so widespread between 2022 to 2025 that they have their own Wikipedia page. It’s a reflection of several factors, including the unsustainable rise in development costs of AAA-class games—the industry’s equivalent of blockbuster franchises. Those rising costs have been paired with diminishing returns, so it’s a case of bigger and bigger investments chasing after a shrinking core market.
While millions of people play videogames, the audience that dedicated to the medium’s prototypical genres—console-based, single-player, story-driven games—is smaller these days than those who play on their phones or on console players locked into specific live-service games. It’s a crowded field, with companies struggling to maintain or earn their spot in the market with expensive new projects, but failed projects plus cutthroat competition are resulting in more and more layoffs.
As a report in PC Gamer recently put it, there is no intuitive moral or productive rhyme or reason to the path being pursued by the gaming giants. Developers can create an unsuccessful game, have that same game called “successful” publicly by their employers—who then lay them off. Then there are the layoffs resulting from mergers and acquisitions or when a company decides it needs a strategic restructure, and of course the job cuts that happen for no apparent reason at all.
According to the layoffs tracker at Udonis.co (a mobile game marketing company), almost 34,000 people were laid off in the games industry in the past three years (over 8,500 in 2022; over 10,500 in 2023; and over 14,600 in 2024), with another 1,200 laid off in the just the first four months of 2025.
Finance capital and the rot economy
This is partially run-of-the-mill capitalism: an illogical drive for infinite growth in a world of finite resources and customers leads to companies perpetually projecting profits that are impossible to sustainably pursue because CEOs must convince shareholders they will win the zero-sum game.
Specific to the videogame industry, though, the recent irrationality derives from the aberration of astronomical success enjoyed by game producers in 2020 due to the unique conditions of the global pandemic. Workers (and thus game players) were stuck home with plenty of time and, in some cases, disposable income.
Another component, which connects these layoffs to those in tech and media, is the same phenomenon that’s raising home prices and nosediving U.S. politics into the abyss: the dominance of finance capital in our economy.
Readers of People’s World are likely familiar with Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov’s definition of fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital” in his 1935 address to the Comintern.
Earlier, in his 1923 book Finance Capital, Austrian-born Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding also pinpointed the problem:
“The most characteristic features of ‘modern’ capitalism are those processes of concentration which, on the one hand, ‘eliminate free competition’ through the formation of cartels and trusts, and on the other, bring bank and industrial capital into an ever more intimate relationship. Through this relationship…capital assumes the form of finance capital, its supreme and most abstract expression.”
Finance capital is a conduit for monopoly, capital shorn of any concern about producing tangible goods or services. It is focused on financialization, growth at all costs; sustainability is irrelevant. U.S. citizens are learning the truth about what happens when finance capital is allowed to run rampant, as plutocrats gut our administrative infrastructure and Bernie Sanders and AOC help re-familiarize working people with the reality that “oligarchs” can exist outside Russia.
There are warning signs that the country is traveling swiftly toward open terrorist dictatorship, and we’ve already spent years witnessing the corporate consolidation of industries—monopolization in action. This vertical and horizontal integration enables disciplining labor ad infinitum; reducing expectations for decent, much less democratic, workplaces.
Simultaneously and inevitably, we see a reduction in the quality of products corresponding with and resulting from the endless rent-seeking behavior of companies searching for new ways to extract capital from workers as consumers. Every tech company becomes a finance company; actual innovation in the fields of work or leisure is sacrificed in pursuit of abstract “value.”
This process, in the context of the digital world, has been called “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow, but another term is “the rot economy.” As tech critic Ed Zitron explained several months ago:
“Venture capital and the public markets don’t actually reward or respect ‘good’ businesses or ‘good’ CEOs; they reward people that can steer the kind of growth that raises the value of an asset. Elon Musk’s success with Tesla didn’t come from the inarguable point that he ended the monopoly of the internal combustion engine; it came from his canny manipulation of the symbolic value of a stock through lies and half-truths, meaning that there was always a perpetual reason that Tesla was a ‘growth’ company and a ‘good stock to buy.’ Sundar Pichai isn’t paid $280 million a year because he’s a ‘good CEO.’ After all, Google has all but destroyed its search product. He’s paid because he finds ways to increase the overall growth of the company (even while their cloud division still loses money), and thus the stock goes up.
“The consequences are that these companies will continue to invest in things that grow the overall revenue of the company over all else. They will mass-hire and mass-fire, because there are no consequences when the markets don’t really care as long as the company itself stays valuable. Venture capitalists certainly don’t mind—after all, it’s ‘less burn’ to ‘get you through’ tough climates that were arguably created by the poor hiring decisions of a company that was never incentivized to hire sustainably or operate profitably.”
Zitron also uses the analogy of a sustainable brush-clearing fire and aptly notes that we have turned our society over to arsonists.
Amazon, online book retailer turned everything-store, owns—among other things—Whole Foods, MGM films, and a good share of the internet infrastructure we all rely on every day. Amazon’s owner, Jeff Bezos, bought the Washington Post in 2013. This year, Bezos infamously directed the paper’s editorial page to focus on promoting right-wing ideology. Connections between concentrated wealth, suffering and disempowerment of workers, and the information ecosystem enabling corruption is clear.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—led by right-wing billionaire Mark Zuckerberg—cut 3,600 workers loose of their wages and benefits in January. Facebook, besides being a de facto news source for much of the country and window into the internet in some parts of the world, urged a media industry-wide “pivot to video,” using wildly incorrect statistics to push online publications into creating video content that began with worker layoffs.
Connecting some of these tech overlords to the game studio layoffs are longstanding holding companies that bought games media companies over the last decade, leaving journalists and staff at games publishers as casualties.
Consolidation = Layoffs
In May 2024, Ziff Davis acquired Gamer Network (among whose components were GamesIndustry.biz, RockPaperShotgun, and VG247) through IGN, leading to immediate layoffs followed by “soft layoffs” toward year’s end. In the middle of last summer, the media giant’s Humble Games publishing company was shuttered, its 36 employees rendered redundant. Robin Bea at Inverse wrote that the company “announced layoffs with a social media post so impersonal and vague that some suspect it was written by AI.”
G/O Media—formed in 2019 when private equity firm Grant Hill Partners purchased 12 websites from Univision (the Gizmodo Media Group and Onion Portfolio)—has been disposing of those sites since 2020, in earnest between 2023 and this year, leaving layoffs in its wake. Deadspin’s entire staff resigned in 2019 after the editor was fired for not “sticking to sports,” leading to the founding of independent site Defector (mass layoffs followed the sale of resurrected Deadspin to Lineup Publishing last March).
Three-quarters of Jezebel resigned over 2021 because of a “hostile work environment” – Jezebel was sold alongside Splinter News in 2023 to Paste Magazine (disclosure: I was editorial intern for Paste Games in 2021 and have done most of my critical writing there); The A.V. Club was sold to Paste in 2024. Seven other sites were sold off between March 2023 and April 2025.
In 2022, Fandom (the company relying on free labor from hobby enthusiasts to populate its family of online pop culture encylopedias), bought several sites from Red Ventures, several of which (TV Guide, Metacritic, GameSpot, and Giant Bomb) came to Red Ventures under its $500 million deal to buy CNET from Paramount. In January 2023, layoffs followed at Giant Bomb and GameSpot. In March of 2023, layoffs at CNET came after reports emerged of AI-produced articles. In October 2024, JD Knapp at The Wrap reported further job cuts. On Thursday, May 1, 2025, creative disagreements saw Giant Bomb succumb to resignations.
Also on May Day, Kotaku’s Ethan Gach reported that Vox Media sold major videogames site Polygon (amid contract negotiations) to Valnet, prompting 25 layoffs, including most of the editorial masthead. Valnet owns several pop-culture websites (including Comic Book Resources, Screen Rant, and Collider) based around search-engine optimization (disclosure: my first paid internet writing was for Screen Rant). Valnet ownership is currrently suing The Wrap for its investigation into their “sweatshop”-like model, which Umberto Gonzalez reported on in March.
Games and tech layoffs
Back at the concentric circle where gaming lies inside tech, January reports from Windows Central and Business Insider named Microsoft—whose Xbox brand is currently a target of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement because of Microsoft infrastructure supporting Israel’s targeting of journalists in the Palestinian genocide and firing employees who rallied against it—came into 2025 looking to lay workers off without severance and with an immediate end to benefits.
In April, Fast Company (drawing on Business Insider) reported Microsoft offering buyouts of “low-performing” employees, being given five days to make a decision that will shape their livelihoods. The churn culture in tech and at Microsoft means total numbers might remain stable, at least until the recession for which these companies have spent three years preparing.
Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees from the three subsidiary conglomerates (Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media, and Activision Blizzard King) under the Microsoft Gaming brand last January. Microsoft Gaming followed this by closing three studios in May and eliminating 650 further roles this past September.
According to the layoffs.fyi database, at least 45,910 tech workers were already laid off in the U.S. in 2025. With a tariff-expedited recession likely, it seems unlikely the rate of layoffs will decrease, in tech, games, media, or elsewhere.
Time to level up solidarity
Publishing has a long history of militant labor mobilization; many outlets mentioned here (like IGN and Vox) have hard-won unions connected to NewsGuild and the Writer’s Guild of America, whose screenwriters held a five-month strike in 2023.
In the world of video game development, workers have been organizing with the Communications Workers of America, prompted by job precarity and abuses in places like Activision Blizzard King, for instance.
Unions are crucial to building worker power; they’re the means to advocate for better compensation and protections through collective bargaining, which is key to softening the blow of layoffs if and when they com. However, the balance of forces has not yet shifted to preclude rampant layoffs in the U.S.; we lack the protections that exist even in other capitalist countries like France and Japan. The goal is for workers to realize our troubles are connected across industries, with the same class antagonists and sometimes literally the same people attacking workers in multiple sectors.
While some in the consent manufacturing sector of the media are keen to turn us against one another, it is important we recognize our shared struggle. Precarity can undermine solidarity, but it also inspires it. Knowing you can lose it all any time provokes fear of risk, but it also helps build the understanding that we must struggle together to fight the bosses.
“White collar” and “blue collar” workers have to understand we are all workers, whatever sort of labor we do. Our shared natural antagonist extracting our surplus value as laborers and discretionary income as consumers remains the capitalist class wreaking havoc through financialization.
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