Independent, community-driven estimates suggest that more than 10,000 game developers may have been laid off last year, up from more than 8,500 workers in 2022. Thousands of workers across video game companies and adjacent workplaces have already been let go in 2024 as the industry grapples with how to move forward.

Over the past several years, workers within the largely nonunion U.S. industry have grown increasingly vocal about workplace issues ranging from gender discrimination to unpaid overtime and mandatory arbitration practices, with walkouts at Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty) and Riot Games (League of Legends) over company issues, and worker groups at Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft (Assassin’s Creed) publicly pressuring leadership to make changes.

Over the course of 2023 to date, dozens of game developers and related companies from all over the world have laid off an estimated total of 6,400 employees, per VideoGameLayoffs.com. This has included major players such as Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Amazon, Unity, and Microsoft.

Roughly 8,500 video game industry workers were laid off in 2022, according to a layoff tracker created by video game artist Farhan Noor. That number jumped to 10,500 in 2023. Layoffs in 2024 are outpacing those numbers, with more than 6,000 people laid off from their video game industry jobs just 90 days into the year.