There's too much carnage to keep up with – Xbox is in the middle of chopping up 3,200 jobs, Ubisoft's on track to have made a total of 4,000 layoffs since 2022, and Embracer is now indistinguishable from a natural disaster, having laid waste to $2 billion-worth of acquisitions by closing, canceling, and setting fire to everything unlucky enough to be in its path. Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead QA manager Dave Gallacher has seen it all, and he despises it.
"Each structural point of our industry is controlled by money and those with it have been greedy morons for the past 10+ years," Gallacher, who spent 10 years at DICE before joining Arrowhead this summer, says in a LinkedIn thread discussing worker-owned studios as the possible answer to mass layoffs. "How Ubisoft and Embracer leadership aren't in prison absolutely eludes me for their shady tactics, and the victims are very much these thousands of talented developers we're hoping can summon money out of the ether to start studios."
That's a painful analysis, but Gallacher has clearly been working with it for a while. Last week, as Xbox began culling thousands of positions and leaving studios bleeding out the neck, Gallacher said in another LinkedIn post, "For the past 3 years, I've used the phrase 'this year is going to be a bloodbath,' relating to the games industry. And somehow it gets worse each year."
"Where is that money going?" he continues. "A deluded CEO speaking of reaching 'billions of players' whilst pouring the newly pilfered wages of talented Devs into the plagiarism machine (AI). Absolute darkest timeline shit."
Microsoft. Ubisoft. Embracer. EA, Gallacher's former employer, which reportedly laid off Battlefield 6 devs after they helped make a game that sold 20 million copies. Epic Games, which exterminated more than 1,000 jobs in March after being disappointed its $26 billion game Fortnite is waning in popularity. There's not a single angel among these video game industry behemoths, only vultures.
Since I read and write about layoffs and game cancellations nearly every day, recently, I find it difficult to feel anything toward it that resembles optimism. I also play video games for fun every day, and my own headlines about money and lost jobs knock around the back of my head while I grapple with the fact that, despite everything, I still love playing video games.
"Some parts continue to drive obsessive behaviour, some parts make you want to go play in traffic," Gallacher said earlier this week in another post about the video game industry. "It's complicated." There's not much else to say – just, if Ubisoft and Embracer leadership ever do go to prison like Gallacher fantasizes, I think it should be the one from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
