The games business can look contradictory from a distance. Huge launches, billion-dollar corporate deals and high-profile franchises suggest abundance. At the same time, thousands of developers have lost jobs. A new set of layoff figures makes the contradiction easier to understand: the industry may have added a modest number of jobs overall from 2022 through 2026, while the pain of job cuts has been concentrated intensely in particular regions and types of studios.
That geographic divide is central to an assessment from Amir Satvat, who has operated the ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker since 2022. His projection places total eliminated jobs between 2022 and 2026 at 57,628. Yet he also estimates that an equivalent number of jobs were created during that period, leaving the industry modestly larger by a few thousand people.
Those totals do not make the layoffs less disruptive for the people affected. They do, however, challenge the idea that a single headline number can describe every development hub equally. Satvat’s tracker indicates that 66% of layoff events in 2026 so far took place in North America, accounting for 79% of the workers affected. North America and Europe together represented 96% of events.
Japan, in this framing, is not simply “doing fine” while everyone else struggles. Rather, its major companies appear to have operated with a different set of assumptions: comparatively high retention, smaller teams, less participation in the rush toward vast live-service projects, and substantially lower executive pay than some of their Western peers.
A regional crisis, not an evenly shared one
Satvat describes conditions for developers at traditional AAA studios in North America and western Europe in stark terms, comparing the severity there to the 1983 crash. He estimates that, for a period lasting 12 to 18 months, California alone accounted for more than half of global layoffs.
That is an important qualifier when people talk about “the games industry” as though it were one employer with one balance sheet. It is a global collection of companies, studios, contractors and platform holders. A job created in one country or sector does not restore the job, team knowledge, local network or financial stability lost by a developer elsewhere. Net employment growth and widespread insecurity can therefore exist at the same time.
It also means that a successful blockbuster or acquisition should not automatically be read as evidence of broad employment health. Large transactions and anticipated releases can coexist with layoffs, studio closures and cancelled projects. The reported figures instead point to a labor market in which growth and losses have been distributed very unevenly.
What the retention figures suggest
Satvat singles out Nintendo, Capcom and Konami as examples of Japanese companies with staff retention above 97%. Retention is the share of employees who remain with an organization over a given period. High retention is not a complete measure of workplace quality, and the available figures do not explain every company’s individual practices. But it can be a meaningful indicator of whether a business is regularly shedding teams or maintaining continuity.
Continuity matters especially in game development. Teams accumulate practical knowledge that does not fit neatly into a project plan: how an internal tool works, why a production decision was made, which technical compromise prevents a bug from returning, and how collaborators communicate under deadlines. When large-scale cuts happen repeatedly, that knowledge can leave with the people who hold it.
The value of retention is therefore more than a flattering human-resources statistic. It can affect a studio’s ability to plan sequels, support existing games and begin new work without constantly rebuilding its institutional memory. For players, the practical consequences may show up less as a single visible feature and more in a company’s capacity to sustain franchises and release schedules over time.
Still, the figures should be read carefully. A retention rate describes stability inside a company; it does not prove that every worker in the wider national industry has the same security. Nor does it establish that one country has discovered a universally transferable solution. What it does provide is a notable contrast with the regions represented by the overwhelming majority of recent layoff events.
Smaller, leaner teams change the risk calculation
Satvat’s explanation centers partly on scale. His understanding is that Japanese teams are generally smaller and leaner, and that they were not pulled as deeply into projects built around 500-person teams or the live-service trend.
Live service describes games designed to receive ongoing updates, events or other continuing support after launch. That model can produce long-running player engagement, but it also demands continuing operations, content production and staffing. The source material does not claim that all live-service games fail, or that Japanese companies never make them. The narrower point is that avoiding a broad commitment to this expensive model may reduce exposure when companies reassess costs.
Likewise, “leaner” should not be mistaken for a synonym for overworked or under-resourced. In this context, it refers to operating with fewer people relative to the mega-project model. The potential business advantage is straightforward: a smaller fixed payroll and a less oversized production structure may be easier to support when a project misses expectations or market conditions change.
That does not mean small teams are inherently safer. A small studio can be vulnerable to one disappointing release, while a large organization can have resources that help it survive a setback. The significance of Satvat’s observation is about concentration of risk. If a company builds plans around extraordinarily large teams and costly, always-on games, a later effort to reduce costs can affect a great many jobs at once.
For anyone watching the business side of games, this is a reason to distinguish between the size of a release and the durability of the organization behind it. Bigger productions may attract attention, but a more manageable structure can be the factor that protects jobs when the market becomes less forgiving.
Executive pay is part of the comparison
Satvat also points to executive compensation. He says Japanese executives can still be paid very well, but describes compensation in the range of $2 million to $3 million rather than $30 million. The contrast is illustrated by two reported examples: EA chief executive Andrew Wilson received $38,649,984 in the last fiscal year, approximately 305 times the median employee’s pay, while Nintendo reported total compensation of $2 million for president Shuntaro Furukawa around the same time.
These examples do not, by themselves, establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between executive salaries and layoffs. Corporate compensation, staffing decisions and project budgets are all separate choices, and the supplied information does not break down their full financial contexts. It would be too simple to claim that cutting one executive package automatically preserves a particular number of jobs.
But the comparison is still useful as a statement about priorities and scale. When pay at the top is vastly higher, it sharpens the public question of how companies distribute the rewards and risks of their strategy. Employees are often asked to absorb the consequences of shifts in spending, production plans and investor expectations. A dramatic executive-to-worker pay ratio makes that imbalance harder to ignore.
The contrast also adds texture to the claim that Japan’s major game companies have been more resilient. The argument is not merely that their teams are smaller; it is that staffing scale, project ambition and leadership compensation may form a connected corporate model. That model appears less dependent on the boom-era assumption that every major game needs to become an enormous, continuously supported platform.
What this means for players and developers
There is no comfort in aggregate employment data for people who have already lost their positions, particularly in North America and Europe. An industry can gain jobs overall while leaving individual developers, cities and specialties facing a deep downturn. Satvat’s regional breakdown makes clear that the burden has not been shared evenly.
For developers, the Japanese example is best treated as an area for scrutiny rather than a one-line blueprint. High retention, controlled team sizes and restrained executive compensation are associated here with greater stability, but the available information does not prove that any one factor is sufficient on its own. The larger lesson is that companies have choices about how aggressively they scale up, which trends they chase and who bears the downside when plans change.
For players, layoffs can feel remote until they affect the games that get made and maintained. Fewer experienced developers, repeated reorganization and disrupted teams can reshape what companies are willing to fund. Stability, meanwhile, can help preserve expertise across long-running series. That makes employment practices part of the medium’s future, not merely a spreadsheet issue.
The broader corporate landscape is also changing well beyond games, as seen in other industry discussions of how companies organize their long-term bets. In games, Satvat’s data puts a sharper point on the immediate issue: the downturn is real, but it is not happening everywhere in the same way. Japan’s relative stability offers a concrete counterexample to the assumption that mass layoffs are an unavoidable cost of making major games.
