It’s been a pretty bruising year to work in the games industry. Thousands of developers have lost their jobs as development outfits and publishers wrestle with struggling post-pandemic conditions, corporate greed, or the fact that their hot new game has launched and failed to find an audience.
Back in February, I wrote that the AAA games industry was doomed, but I can’t claim to have predicted how much this has sucked. Studios working on incredible games have been decimated, and genuine friends and long-term colleagues have lost their jobs. It sucks. There’s no way to put a spin on it or try to polish things up, but it feels important to acknowledge that while some fantastic games have been released this year, there’s been a brutal human cost that’s hard to ignore despite the relative quality of releases.
