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 conversat ... Read full article.