In a survey by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and Omdia, 35% of game developers said that they were affected in one way or another by the cuts actively taking place in game development in recent months.
According to the study:
- 17% said their colleagues had been fired;
- 11% noted layoffs in other departments or teams of their company;
- 7% were fired.
The cuts mainly affected QA specialists. Among them, the largest number of people were fired (22% versus 7% among all surveyed developers). Business development specialists and representatives of financial departments were the least affected by layoffs (only 2% of them were made redundant).
So it's not surprising that 56% of respondents said they were concerned about the possibility of being fired in the next 12 months.
As one of the respondents noted: "Layoffs have now become a cause for concern, because they do not follow the usual order. Previously, they usually occurred after the project was sent for sale. I can't say that it was a great practice, but now it has become very difficult to predict who and when the cuts may affect."
Only a third of the respondents are not worried about layoffs at all.