Gaming, in brief

A researcher who tracks games job cuts has nearly doubled his forecast for this year, from about 7,500 to 14,666. [1]

Around 10,140 cuts had already been announced by 11 August, more than in the whole of 2025. [1]

The industry still employs roughly 750,000 people, slightly more than in 2022, so the work is moving rather than vanishing. [1]

More than two thirds of the cuts landed in North America, where he counted 25,000 lost roles. [1]

Job openings across Asia and the Pacific rose 10% over the same stretch, with 12% growth in China. Europe stayed flat. [1]

Money and jobs came apart because the top 20 games now take between half and 60% of everything players spend. [1]

On PC the pile-up is sharper still: 79 titles account for 80% of the hours people play. [1]

The door at the bottom has closed. A new graduate with no games experience has a 4% chance of being hired within a year. [1]

Adverts for the same job now ask for three more years of experience, because people who were laid off are applying for it. [1]

Microsoft's Xbox division is cutting 3,200 jobs. Staff at Bethesda say careers of two and three decades ended in two-minute meetings. [2][3]

He named two problems nobody has a plan for: too many games for any of them to be found, and what AI does next. A record 720 games launched on Steam in a single week. [1][4]

Why it matters. Watch the entry-level adverts rather than the layoff count: the reset ends when jobs stop asking for three more years of experience than they used to. [1]

Brian Ward is stepping down as chief executive of Savvy Games Group, Saudi Arabia's roughly $38bn games investment arm, after five years of buying studios. His interim replacement is Turqi Alnowaiser, deputy governor of the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi state fund that owns Savvy. [5][6][7]

Why it matters. The outside executive who sat between the state and the game companies it owns is gone, weeks after the same fund led the $55bn buyout of Electronic Arts.

The French studio behind Life is Strange announced a transformation plan on Monday, blaming profound changes in the industry's economics. Its statement names a job-preservation plan and talks with the staff union at a meeting today. [8]

Why it matters. The company has not said how many jobs are at risk. That number comes out of a union meeting rather than a press release.

Developers at Bethesda Game Studios told the Guardian that careers of two and three decades ended in meetings lasting two minutes. Two union representatives said they doubt the studio can hold its old quality with who is left. [2][3]

Why it matters. It puts faces on the lead's numbers: the cuts hit the studio behind Skyrim and Fallout, not only the weak projects.

Between 24 and 30 August, 720 games went on sale on Steam, about four an hour, tracked by ICO Partners. Around 530 of them have fewer than ten player reviews. [4]

Why it matters. Steam released 436 games in the whole of 2013. Almost all of this week's releases will never be found by anyone.

Nexus Mods, which hosts player-made game modifications, is buying SteamDB, the site that tracks every version and price change on Steam. Nexus says it wants the build history so mods can tell when a game update will break them. [9]

Why it matters. Two volunteer-built services that the PC scene relies on are now under one owner, and neither is Valve.

A US federal court has given preliminary approval to a near-$8m settlement covering people who bought digital PlayStation games that were also sold as retail download codes, between April 2019 and December 2023. The case argues Sony's rules let it set digital prices without competition. [10]

Why it matters. It is a separate case from the ownership suit in which Sony is arguing that reasonable buyers already know they do not own their digital games. [11]

The 30-minute Grand Theft Auto 6 preview reached 31.1 million views on Netflix in four days, the streaming service's most-watched title of the week, and led its English-language film list in 87 of 93 countries. [12]

Why it matters. A games advert out-drew every film on the service, which is why the console maker below has stopped paying for adverts of its own.

Major US retailers ran out of the PS5 Pro after the Grand Theft Auto 6 preview, and other sellers listed it at up to $1,400 against Sony's $899 price. [13]

Why it matters. The game does not come out until November. The hardware is already being priced on it.

Average yearly revenue per active PlayStation user rose from 23,580 yen in the 2018 financial year to 37,485 yen in 2025, about $230 more, according to analyst Daniel Ahmad. Sony's chief executive says the company no longer markets the PS5 aggressively. [14][15]

Why it matters. Higher subscription tiers, more add-on buying and dearer hardware did what a bigger audience used to do.

The Japanese magazine Sentaku reported that the Final Fantasy maker was looking at taking itself off the stock market, and the shares rose nearly 12%. Square Enix said on Tuesday that no such thing is being considered. [16]

Why it matters. A rumour alone moved the price 12%, which is a measure of how normal buyouts have become in games this year.

The Polish maker of The Witcher reported half-year net profit of 249.1m zlotys, about $66.7m, beating forecasts, on revenue up 23%. Licensing its characters to other companies was a big part of it. [17]

Why it matters. It is one of the few large studios growing without an owner behind it, and it is doing it partly by renting out its worlds.

CD Projekt says The Witcher 4, due in 2028, already launches on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X, unlike Cyberpunk 2077, which was built PC-first and shipped broken on consoles. Its co-chief says the studio is not worried about rumoured next-generation console delays. [18][19]

Why it matters. The fix for a disastrous launch was not more testing at the end. It was refusing to let the game only work in one place.

Supercell, the Finnish studio behind Clash Royale, expects its purchase of fellow Finnish studio Metacore to complete at the end of September. Terms are not being disclosed. Metacore made Merge Mansion, a puzzle game that keeps selling to the same players for years. [20]

Why it matters. Supercell reported revenue down 4% last year and is doubling what it spends on new games while most of the industry cuts.

MBC, a large Saudi broadcaster that the country's Public Investment Fund took a 54% stake in during 2025, has started a games arm with a first title, 1001 Threads of Mizan. Its head says the studio has a policy against using generative AI. [21]

Why it matters. The same state fund is now both the biggest buyer of existing studios and a builder of new ones.

Double Fine, the Psychonauts studio Microsoft released this summer, has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a two-week game jam that will become a finished game. A stretch goal promising Brutal Legend 2 sits at $100m, a figure Eurogamer reads as a joke. [22][23]

Why it matters. A studio that was owned by one of the richest companies on earth is now asking players directly for its budget.

The tactics game reviewed at 85 on Metacritic and arrived with heavy stutter and bugs on PC. Its studio, Bit Reactor, had furloughed most of its staff before launch, so it is not clear who fixes it. [24][25]

Why it matters. This is what a furlough looks like from the player's side: the patch that a game like this normally gets may never be written.

A former producer at id Software says most of the Doom: The Dark Ages add-on was built in three or four months, with two months of 12-hour days and some 17-hour ones. Colleagues who had worked 20 years in Hollywood called it the worst crunch they had seen. [26]

Why it matters. Add-on content is sold as a small bonus. The schedule behind it is not small.

Secret Neighbor, the multiplayer version of horror game Hello Neighbor, is offline. An attacker got administrator access and deleted player profiles and progress. They said they would keep going until the game was pulled from every store. [27]

Why it matters. The demand was not money. Backing up saves does not answer someone whose goal is the game's removal.

Meta's new app Pocket lets people build small games by describing them, with no coding. Its terms give Meta broad control over what comes out. [28]

Why it matters. The thing being collected is not the games. It is the store of what millions of people asked for.

About 30,000 people lined up 24 hours early for the last closed test of the shooter Wardogs, which needs a $40 pre-order to enter. The studio, Bulkhead, says the game has passed a million Steam wishlists and is using the test to break its own servers. [29]

Why it matters. Charging for the stress test is now a normal way to fund the servers that the launch will need.

1047 Games switches off dedicated servers for Empulse and Splitgate: Arena Reloaded today, saying neither makes enough money to pay for them, and says it is probably done with the genre. Players can still host their own matches. [30][31]

Why it matters. The studio raised $100m and its founder talked about becoming the next Riot Games. The servers going dark is where that ends.

Studios including New Blood, Failbetter and Abandoned Sheep say they are now routinely accused of generating their own artwork, including teams that publicly refuse to use the tools. [32]

Why it matters. Once nobody can tell by looking, the cost lands on the people who did the work by hand.

Xbox said in October 2025, when it raised Game Pass Ultimate to $30 a month, that subscribers would get more than 75 games on their release day each year. It hit that in the year since, through the price rise, a restructure and 3,200 job cuts. [33][2]

Why it matters. The promise that survived the year was the one made to subscribers, not the one made to studios.