The numbers are not easy to look at. According to tracking by business development director Amir Satvat, the games industry shed approximately 9,175 jobs in 2025, following an estimated 15,631 in 2024 and around 8,500 in 2022. The GDC 2026 State of the Game Industry report, based on surveys of more than 2,300 industry professionals, found that one in three US-based game developers had been laid off in the past two years. Half of all respondents said their current or most recent employer had conducted layoffs in the past twelve months.
The coverage of all this has been relentless, and it has been largely accurate. The industry did over-hire during the pandemic boom, and the correction has been severe and unevenly distributed. AAA studios in North America and Western Europe have been hit hardest. Two-thirds of respondents at AAA studios in the GDC 2026 survey reported that their companies had conducted layoffs.
But the coverage has also created a picture that is more uniform than the reality. Not every studio has been through this. Some have grown. Some have shipped games, retained their teams, and built cultures that their people describe as genuinely good places to work. The question worth asking, particularly if you are evaluating where to build your career, is what those studios are actually doing differently.
The Layoff Cycle Was Not Random
Before looking at what good looks like, it is worth understanding what drove the bad. The studios that shed the most people were not simply unlucky. There were patterns.
The most common factor was over-reliance on a single revenue model or platform, combined with aggressive headcount expansion during 2020 and 2021 when engagement metrics were inflated by pandemic conditions. When those conditions normalized, the business case for the headcount disappeared faster than the headcount did. Studios that had built their projections on live-service games that failed to find audiences, or on platform deals that did not materialize, found themselves with large teams and no clear work for them.
The second factor was geographic concentration. Over 70% of the layoffs tracked by Satvat occurred in North America, with more than 50% in California alone. This was partly a reflection of where the largest studios are based, but it was also a reflection of cost structures. Studios in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia were not immune to the downturn, but they were less exposed to the specific dynamics that drove the North American correction.
The third factor was leadership quality. The studios that navigated the period best were generally the ones where leadership had been honest with their teams about the business situation, had avoided over-hiring in the first place, and had a clear sense of what they were building and why. This is not a comfortable observation because it implies that some of the layoffs were avoidable, but the evidence points in that direction.
What the Studios That Came Through It Differently Have in Common
The GamesIndustry.biz Best Places to Work Awards, which are based on anonymous employee surveys rather than studio self-nomination, provide one of the clearest windows into what good culture looks like in practice. The 2025 UK edition recognized studios including Playground Games (Best Large Company), Fireshine Games, Rare, NaturalMotion, Behaviour Interactive, and Wushu Studios across categories covering health and wellbeing, diversity, training and development, and environmental responsibility.
These studios are not all the same. They vary in size, ownership structure, genre focus, and business model. But looking across the ones that have consistently appeared in these rankings, and at the studios that have maintained team stability through the downturn, a few patterns emerge.
Scope discipline. The studios that have fared best are almost universally ones that have been clear about what they are making and have not tried to expand into adjacent areas without the foundation to support it. Larian Studios, which shipped Baldur's Gate 3 to extraordinary commercial and critical success, has been explicit about its approach: a single large project, fully resourced, with a team that has worked together across multiple titles. They have publicly committed to not using generative AI for concept art, a decision that signals something about how they think about the relationship between the work and the people doing it.
Retention as a metric. The studios that are genuinely good places to work tend to have unusually long average tenures. This is worth checking before you apply. If a studio's leadership team has been in place for five or more years, if the same names keep appearing in credits across multiple titles, if people who leave come back, those are meaningful signals. High turnover is almost always a symptom of something structural, and it compounds over time because institutional knowledge walks out with every departure.
Honest communication about the business. This one is harder to verify from the outside, but it comes up consistently in employee accounts of studios that have maintained trust through difficult periods. The studios that handled the downturn best were the ones where leadership communicated clearly and early about what was happening, what the options were, and what decisions were being made and why. The ones that handled it worst were the ones where people found out about layoffs through news reports or sudden calendar invites.
Investment in development that is not contingent on the project. The studios that appeared in the training and development category of the GamesIndustry.biz awards (Rare, NaturalMotion, Studio Gobo, Tanglewood Games, Fireshine Games) share a common characteristic: they treat professional development as an ongoing commitment rather than something that happens when there is budget left over. This matters because it signals that the studio's investment in its people is not purely transactional.
The Geography Shift Is Real and Worth Understanding
One of the clearest findings from the 2025 and 2026 data is that the games industry's centre of gravity is shifting. Satvat's forecast for 2026 predicts that open roles in North America and Western Europe will continue to decrease, while opportunities in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia will grow. This is already visible in the data: studios in Poland, Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, and Brazil have been growing while their counterparts in California and London have been contracting.
This has implications for where you look for work, but it also has implications for what good culture looks like in different markets. The studios in emerging markets that are growing are often doing so with different cost structures, different ownership models, and different relationships to the pressures that drove the North American correction. Some of them have genuinely strong cultures. Some do not. The same principles of evaluation apply, but the context is different.
How to Evaluate Culture Before You Apply
The challenge with culture is that it is largely invisible from the outside, and studios have strong incentives to present themselves well. Here is what actually works.
Read Glassdoor reviews critically, not literally. Individual reviews are often unreliable, but patterns across dozens of reviews over time are meaningful. Pay particular attention to reviews from people who have left, reviews that mention specific practices rather than vague impressions, and the consistency of themes across different roles and time periods. A studio where every negative review mentions the same specific problem is telling you something real.
Look at who has worked there and where they went. LinkedIn is useful for this. If a studio's alumni consistently go on to strong roles elsewhere, that is a positive signal about the quality of the experience. If they consistently leave the industry, or if the same roles are being refilled every twelve to eighteen months, that is worth investigating.
Ask specific questions in interviews. "How did the studio handle the last major challenge it faced?" is a better question than "What is the culture like here?" Ask about the last time a project direction changed significantly and how that was communicated. Ask about what the studio does when someone on the team is struggling. The specificity of the answers tells you more than the content.
Talk to people who have worked there recently. This is the most reliable method and the one most candidates skip. A fifteen-minute conversation with someone who left a studio in the past twelve months will tell you more than any amount of research. Most people are willing to have that conversation if you approach them directly and respectfully.
The Honest Summary
The games industry in 2026 is smaller than it was three years ago, more geographically distributed, and more cautious about headcount. The studios that are doing well are not doing well by accident. They have made specific choices about scope, communication, investment in people, and the relationship between the work and the business model that supports it.
None of this means that the good studios are easy to find or that every studio claiming to have a healthy culture actually does. The gap between what studios say about themselves and what it is actually like to work there remains wide in many cases. But the signals are readable if you know what to look for, and the studios that are genuinely good places to work tend to be consistent in ways that are hard to fake over time.
The industry needs people who are serious about building careers in it, not just landing jobs. The studios that are doing things right are looking for the same thing.