Multiple studios announce developer layoffs

2023 was one of the worst years in gaming for developers, with countless studios either letting a large portion of their staff go or just straight up shutting down entirely. Unfortunately, 2024 does not look set to be any different, with multiple studios announcing layoffs.

With 2023 being such a bad year for studio closures and layoffs in general, the publication Kotaku has taken it upon themselves to document “all of 2024’s layoffs as they happen”. Unfortunately, just a couple weeks into the year and thousands of developers have already been let go, with the most recent coming from CI Games and Behaviour Interactive.

For the uninitiated, CI Games is the publisher of 2023’s Lords of the Fallen and is also known for the Sniper Ghost Warrior series. Taking to Twitter to make the announcement, CI Games’ CEO Marek Tyminski said:

“To preserve business strength and stability, CI Games has made the tough but necessary decision to implement a targeted round of redundancies, affecting approximately 10% of employees across the company. We would like to thank each of them for the part they’ve played during their time with us. Further business optimisations are being made to the organisation’s pipelines and processes.”

Though they have yet to properly address it, Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive confirmed to Kotaku that around 45 employees were let go from their studio earlier this month, saying in a statement:

“Recently, changing market conditions necessitated adjusting the scope of several Behaviour projects. In these situations, our preference is always to reassign talent to other projects. Unfortunately, this option is not always available to us. These departures represented less than 3% of our total workforce.”

2023 saw over 6000 developers lose their jobs – a terrible result for the industry. Unfortunately it seems as though 2024 will be even worse, with over 3000 employees already having been let go within just a few weeks. Hopefully this trend doesn’t continue throughout the entire year.

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KitGuru says: What do you think of all these layoffs? Will 2024 be even worse? What does the industry need to do to fix this? Let us know down below.

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