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Last year, the saying going around the game industry was Survive until 25. The hope was that things would get better after a very rough year for game layoffs and player doldrums. Now we might start thinking about Survive until 26.
So far this year, in the first month of 2025, we’ve had 19 game companies announce closures or layoffs, with a total of at least 500 lost jobs.
Just yesterday, Midnight Society shut down and canceled its Dead Drop game. That might have been foreseen, as Dr. Disrespect parted ways with the company he cofounded after allegations of inappropriate conversations with a minor from his time years earlier at Twitch. Dozens of jobs are affected.
We also saw an unspecified number of jobs affected by changes at Electronic Arts’ BioWare, which saw weaker than expected sales for Dragon Age: Veilguard. And Ubisoft had another layoff affecting 185 people across three studios. It’s still a troubled company and it still has more than 18,000 employees.
I don’t think this means we’re going to have as bad a year as we had in 2024, when there were more than 15,000 jobs lost in games. This year, game job resource champion Amir Satvat estimates we might lose another 9,800 jobs in 2025, but the hiring should come back into a better balance.
Sony just shuffled its management for the whole corporation (Hiroki Totoki is the new CEO) and the PlayStation division (Hideaki Nishino will be the sole CEO). In the latter group, that means a financial guy is taking over, with a diminished role for the creative/developer exec, Hermen Hulst. I don’t interpret that as good news for game jobs.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle came out on December 9.
Microsoft had a stellar lineup in the fourth quarter, with games like Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. But it had a weak quarter, and Indiana Jones only had about four million players, a relatively small percentage of its overall Game Pass subscribers.
Microsoft said its gaming revenue decline 7% in the fourth quarter (its second fiscal quarter ended December 31), which is typically the strongest quarter. Xbox content and services revenue grew 2%, driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft paid $75 billion for Activision Blizzard, acquiring Call of Duty in the deal. But to have that category grow only 2% in the very first quarter when Call of Duty became available on Game Pass? That’s not so good.
On top of that, Xbox hardware revenue declined 29% in the quarter compared to a year ago. That’s a steep decline that suggests Microsoft is due for a console renewal. But that console is nowhere in sight right now, and Microsoft’s leaked papers suggested that day isn’t coming until 2028.
Avowed
Intel reported a loss for the quarter and lost its CEO Pat Gelsinger. Still, his replacements said they expe …