Raj Patel
@rajio
Award winning Director of Marketing & Communications for video games. IGDA, BAFTA, Canadian Game Awards Judge. Speaker, Advocate, Snacker & Flâneur! Reach out if you want to work together or need help with stuff. ✉️raj@ohmpage.ca 🍁Toronto, Canada
Take a moment to guess how much money Star Citizen raised this May, which looks to have been its biggest fundraising month ever. ... go on, guess ... no, an actual number ... in the millions ... seriously just guess a number ... go crazy. how big could their biggest month be? ... $45M!!!
Of the games industry workplaces experiencing layoffs in 2026 that I know of, 52% have no known headcount. And believe me, there are a lot of layoffs and closures that can't be confirmed. This doesn't even consider cancelled contract work, and other soft-layoffs.
I keep giving out game for free. If you're setting up a presence in Gamescom's business area, forget offering free hot coffee to your guests. Everyone offers that and its hot AF in there. Instead buy a couple of these to set up and be a LEGEND everyone wants to meet with.
here are some of the largest incidents i have on record. you'll see i put down 1600 layoffs for today at Xbox, because thats how many people are impacted today. The other 1600 will be logged throughout the next 6 months as they happen.
Oh just FYI we've crossed the 10K threshold for number of people in the games industry laid off so far this calendar year. only 11 layoff waves shy of the total for 2023. 6 months to go.
Look at 2021 to see what 'normal' should be. just so we can keep perspective. Something happened at the start of 2022.
@runwithskizzers.bsky.social I know you will appreciate this, even if nobody else got me.
Now that June is done we can see how games industry layoffs are progressing. We can see that we had a significant number layoff waves in June, and the quarter was pretty bad overall. Quarterly trends are continuing to get worse on average (the white dashed lines) Annual revenue continues rising YoY