Pushing Buttons: It’s been a fantastic year for games – unless you’re someone who makes them

The hero shooter Hyenas, cancelled in September. Photograph: Creative Assembly

October has been a tough month for the games industry, even though it’s barely two weeks in. Fornite creator Epic Games is laying off 830 employees to cut costs, and UK studio Creative Assembly, owned by Sega, is axing the online shooter Hyenas before its official release, with job losses expected. It had been in development for six years.

Creating big-budget video games is tougher now than it’s ever been. The increasing complexity of new titles, with their detailed 4K visuals and elaborate cross-platform online multiplayer modes, means that everything takes longer to develop. Recently, the head of Xbox Games Studios, Matt Booty, told tech site Axios that development cycles for triple A games aren’t two or three years any more: “They’re four and five and six years.”