Amir Satvat's talk at Gamescom Dev laid bare the reasons behind the catastrophic layoffs – and what needs to be done
The games industry is undergoing a reset. That was the message of Gamescom Dev's opening keynote, delivered by Amir Satvat, who until a few days ago was business development manager at Tencent, but is now general partner at 1Up Ventures.
Satvat is best-known for founding the ASGC, which provides help and advice for job seekers, and in a wide-ranging speech, he dove into the data behind the huge numbers of games industry layoffs, the shift of jobs to different regions, the concentration of revenue among just a few key companies, the changing nature of employment and games, and how the industry needs to adapt to face the current crisis.
He started with the bad news. Back in December, Satvat told GamesIndustry.biz that he expected around 7,500 redundancies across the industry in 2026, down from the roughly 9,200 in 2025. Following the huge waves of redundancies this year, Satvat has now revised that prediction to 14,666, not far off from the 2024 peak of 15,631. As of August 11, there have already been around 10,140 announced layoffs this year – more than for the whole of 2025.
Despite this, the total number of people employed in the games industry has barely changed over the past few years.
Satvat cited "very convincing" research from the Game Industry Coffee Chat (GICC) group indicating that roughly 750,000 people are employed directly or indirectly in the games industry, much higher than typically reported figures. "The reason this often gets very undercounted in my opinion is people don't understand the extent of employment in China," explained Satvat.
The upshot is that "even with all these cuts that have been going on," said Satvat, "the industry is actually net positive in terms of employees from 2022 until now." It's only a small growth of less than 1%, but it is growth nonetheless. (Pre-2022, however, the industry saw explosive growth, adding around 150,000 net jobs over the five years from 2017.)
What's happened over the past five years is a geographic transition. "Head count moving from basically North America to basically anywhere else," Satvat said, with the move motivated not just by labour costs but also things like "government incentives and talent availability."
Satvat said that over two-thirds of the layoffs he has been tracking have occurred in North America, pegging the total losses at 25,000 roles amounting to 15% of the workforce. California was hit hardest; in one period of 12-18 months, over 50% of overall layoffs were in that state.
Other regions, meanwhile, have seen a net gain of jobs. Asia Pacific (APAC) saw the number of available jobs increase by 10%, driven by 12% growth within China. The number of roles in Europe, meanwhile, has "basically stayed flat," Satvat said.
One thing that's confusing is why so many layoffs are happening at a time when the games industry is experiencing continued growth. The reason, says Satvat, is that growth is confined to a decreasing number of titles. "You have 50, 60% of the revenue being distributed to just the top 20 games."
On mobile it's increasingly difficult to acquire users, meaning the sector is now focused on monetization of existing players – while on PC, only 79 titles account for 80% of play time. "So the top line numbers look good, but … the numbers are much tougher when you go beneath the surface."
Satvat listed 21 pressures the games industry is facing, including post-pandemic overhiring, changing player habits, longer development cycles, and rising production costs. But the two he worries about the most are discoverability pressure and AI uncertainty, because "to the best of my knowledge, no person has some master plan of how to have a solution to either of those two things, and not solving those two things could be a sinker that invalidates everything else I'm about to talk about."
However, he said that above everything else, the geographic transition we're experiencing is "the biggest driver of change in the industry."
Satvat also pointed to a huge increase in the number of game-related programs at US colleges and graduates from these courses, at the same time as the number of entry-level jobs is declining. "Just in the US for example, there's 400 colleges and universities that now offer credentials. And if you look at the growth in games and interactive media design completions over 14 years, it's gone up 4x."
