https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/over-5000-games-industry-workers-have-already-lost-their-jobs-in-2024/
The number of lay offs is already over half the total announced in…
Without knowing how many people are in the industry, this is hard to quantify. As I'm not in the business myself, I don't have any way to gauge.
If there are 5,000 job loses and there are only 50,000 people in the industry, that's very significant and points to extremely serious industry issues.
If there's 5,000 job loses and there's 5,000,000 people in the industry, that's more of a drop in the ocean, and while it would suck for the people involved, such job cuts wouldn't point to any issues within the industry in and of themselves.
In that latter case, it could simply mean that some individual companies are downsizing and shifting gears to weather economic issues.
Obviously these job loses are a problem, I just wish articles like this would provide that much needed context.
This article compares the number of layoffs this year to last year, and makes a big deal about it. But that tells us NOTHING. That's just comparing two arbitrary numbers in a vacuum.
What I mean is - If the layoffs last year were 5 people, and this year so far it was 20, their headline would be "2024 layoffs QUADRUPLE in January alone!!!".
So, the comparison they're making isn't very informative in a vacuum. Is the number of layoffs they're referencing from last year significant for the industry compared to previous years/decades, or close to average, or....?
What we need here is context and more depth of information in order to develop an understanding of the significance of this data and come to some conclusions.
And of course, it goes without saying that it sucks people are losing their jobs and having their lives thrown up in the air like this, regardless of the industry they work in. I wish them the best in landing on their feet.
As terrible as this is for the people losing their jobs, I hope this becomes an opportunity to thrive in the indie games market
According to this, the video game industry added over 20,000 jobs just last year, and real talent is sparse, so this cut might be mostly unqualified staff who should do something else
It's not the unqualified staff who get laid off, it's the ones working for unqualified leadership.
Did you read the article? They complain about not having someone that does everything (literally calling them unicorns), but also a suspicious lack of talk of wages.
Amidst these cuts, companies are still struggling to find all the technical talent that they need to drive newer, more innovation-focused initiatives.
Uh huh, they can't find the specific "talent," which is really code here for "no wfh." This isn't talent, they're angry that people aren't grovelling at their feet and taking paycuts for what they're worth.
Tech companies must do more than simply attract workers who already have valuable skills, they must develop them, too.
Here we go, there's no way you read this. The issue is that the industry is demanding skills without investing in it, not lack of takent.
...and a ton of other sources
IT executives see the talent shortage as the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies...
Gaming is not one of these. In fact, the gaming industry is not IT at all.
The onus is on you to back up your claims, but also thank you for providing a "good" source finally. The second one was just a BS article that is, again, corporate speak for "avoiding ways to pay for the talent," but the UK one actually had useful information.