Crunch and layoffs

A game ships on a Friday. By the next Friday, a chunk of the people who built it are clearing out their desks. Not because the game flopped — it sold a record number of copies, reviews are glowing, the studio just had its best launch ever. They’re leaving because the project is done. The thing that needed them is finished, and the next thing isn’t ready to need them yet. This pattern — a frantic swell to launch, then a cut right after a hit — repeats across the industry. It isn’t only bad management. It’s the shape of the work itself.

Game work comes in projects, not a steady job

Most office jobs are ongoing. The work this month looks like the work next month. The company keeps a roughly steady team because the demand is roughly steady.

A game is different. A game is a project — it has a start, a build-up, a finish, and then it’s out the door. Making one isn’t a steady stream of work. It’s a single big push that has to land on a date.

And the work isn’t even across that push. At the start, a small team figures out what the game is. Near the end, you need many hands at once — to finish art, fix bugs, polish menus, test on every device. The same project needs five people one year and fifty the next.

That uneven shape is the root of everything that follows.

The swell to launch, and crunch

Because the work piles up toward the deadline, two things happen as launch nears. The team grows — studios hire contractors and temporary staff to get through the heavy final months. And the hours climb. The deadline is fixed (it was announced, marketed, promised to a store), but the work left keeps growing. The only thing that flexes is people’s time.

So overtime stops being a choice and becomes the plan. Sixty-hour weeks. Then seventy. Then weekends. This stretch is called crunch — mandatory long hours to drag a project over the line. It’s planned for. The schedule often assumes it from the start.

Let me put real numbers on one cycle.

A worked example: one project, start to finish

A studio builds a game over three years. Watch the headcount and the weekly hours.

Pre-production (year 1): a core team of 20 people decides what the game is. Normal hours, about 40 a week. The work is design and experiments — you don’t need many hands yet.

Production (year 2): the team grows to 60 as the game gets built in full. Hours creep up — 45 to 50 a week as deadlines stack.

The final push (last 4 months): the studio hires contractors. Headcount hits 90 — 60 permanent staff plus 30 contractors brought in just for the finish. Hours jump to 65 a week, often more. This is crunch. Everyone is racing the fixed launch date.

Ship. The game launches. It’s a hit — two million copies in the first month.

Post-launch (the month after): the project that needed 90 people is over. There’s bug-fixing and small updates, but that’s maybe a 25-person job. The 30 contractors are let go — their contracts ended on purpose. And the studio, looking at a quiet gap before the next big project is funded and staffed, cuts perhaps 15 permanent roles too.

Headcount went 20 → 60 → 90 → 45. Up to the launch, then a hard cut right after the best month the studio ever had.

Why a hit still ends in layoffs

This is the part that surprises people. The game won. So why fire anyone?

Because the project is what hired them, not the profit. A studio with a steady stream of work could move 90 people from a finished game onto the next one. But the next project is rarely ready the day this one ships — it needs funding signed, a plan agreed, a team sized. Until then, the studio is paying 90 salaries for maybe 25 people’s worth of work.

A boom-bust shape does this on its own. The boom (a big launch) needs a swollen team. The bust (the quiet gap after) can’t carry it. The money the hit made doesn’t change the shape of the calendar — there’s still a hole between this project and the next, and a full team can’t sit idle in it. So the team gets cut to fit the gap, then re-grown for the next push.

Bad bosses make it worse. But you can remove every bad boss and the basic shape remains: uneven work, a fixed date, a gap after. The structure produces crunch and layoffs even at a studio that’s doing everything right and making money.

The cost lives in people

It’s easy to read all this as a staffing chart. It isn’t. The swell is a person uprooting their life to take a contract that ends on a known date. The crunch is months of missed dinners and frayed health to hit someone else’s promised launch. The cut is being told, a week after the proudest moment of your career, that the project doesn’t need you anymore.

Every polished menu, every bug that got squashed before you saw it, every game that felt finished — that polish was bought with those final crunch months. The smoothness you enjoy and the cost someone paid are the same thing seen from two sides.

On the whole

The thing to hold onto is that the harm here is mostly structural, not personal. The work comes in projects; projects swell then end; profit doesn’t fill the gap a calendar leaves. Point at one cruel manager and you’ve found a symptom, not the cause. The cause is the shape.

That matters for how you judge it. It’s tempting to think a kinder company, or a hit game, would fix it — and sometimes the edges soften. But the same boom-bust structure that makes a studio hire fifty people for a launch is the structure that can’t keep them after. We are inside this machine, not above it. The games we love are made by people on a clock none of them set, in a cycle that runs the same whether the game wins or loses. Seeing that doesn’t tell you what to do about it. It just makes it harder to pretend the cost isn’t there, folded into the thing in your hands.