GDC Survey Finds 2-Year Layoffs Rose to 34% of Respondents
The previous survey put the figure at 28%, while 54% of respondents who had been laid off remained unemployed.
Layoffs affected 34% of game industry professionals surveyed by GDC during the previous 2 years, up from 28% in the prior edition.
GDC’s 15th edition of the State of the Game Industry survey gathered responses from more than 2,600 professionals across 69 countries. In the United States, 39% said they had been laid off in the past 2 years, compared with 33% in the previous survey, published in January.
Among respondents who had been laid off, 25% said their latest layoff happened in the 3 months before the survey, while another 43% placed it 3 to 12 months earlier. Seventeen percent of this group said they had been laid off twice in the past 2 years, and 3% said at least 3 times.
More than half of laid-off respondents remained unemployed, 54% overall and 59% in the United States. Separately, 27% of those laid off in the 2-year period had submitted at least 100 job applications, whether or not they had since found work.
Among respondents who were employed, 45% agreed at least slightly that their jobs were secure for the next 12 months. Of unemployed respondents, 72% were not confident they would find a game industry job within that period. Across the full sample, 81% were concerned about their future in the industry, including 51% who strongly agreed, while 73% disagreed that they were hopeful about where it was headed.
The survey adds a new measure to a downturn Double Fine founder Tim Schafer described in September 2026 as lasting about 4 years. He said the hiring rebound he expected after layoffs had not arrived, as detailed in his description of a four-year industry slump.
Survey results do not amount to a census of global game employment. Only 6% of respondents came from East, South and Southeast Asia, with most of that group based in Japan, leaving the sample weighted toward Western markets.
At the 2026 Gamescom Dev opening keynote, 1Up Ventures general partner Amir Satvat estimated global game industry employment at about 750,000. He argued that the total had grown since 2022, with jobs moving from North America to other regions, and pointed to China’s workforce as a reason global employment counts can miss workers. GDC’s figures track layoffs among survey participants, not the net size of the global workforce.
How should readers interpret these layoff figures when only 6% of respondents came from East, South and Southeast Asia?
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