Key Takeaways
- 57,628 gaming industry jobs have been lost globally between 2022 and 2026, according to the ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker run by Amir Satvat.
- In 2026 alone, 96% of all gaming layoffs happened in North America and Europe — Japan has been largely insulated.
- Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami all maintain staff retention rates of 97% or higher.
- Satvat identifies three core reasons for Japan’s resilience: smaller, leaner teams; a refusal to chase live-service mega-projects; and dramatically lower executive compensation.
- Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa earned $2 million in total compensation. EA’s Andrew Wilson earned $38.6 million. Both figure in the same conversation about studio health.
- Epic’s Tim Sweeney described the current situation as “the worst videogame crash, or disruption, that we’ve seen since the 1980s.”
- California alone accounted for more than half of all global gaming layoffs during a 12-to-18-month stretch — Satvat calls it “ground zero for the destruction.”
- The gaming industry has actually grown modestly overall in headcount since 2022 — but all of that growth is in regions outside North America and western Europe.
If you’ve been paying any attention to gaming industry news in 2026, you already know it’s been brutal. Microsoft Xbox axed 3,200 jobs and lost four studios. Bungie hollowed out after Destiny 2 ended. EA, Epic, PUBG Productions, Take-Two, Warner Bros., and dozens of smaller studios all made mass cuts. It has been, by any honest measure, one of the worst years in gaming employment history. And yet — Nintendo hasn’t had notable layoffs. Capcom and Konami are posting record revenues. Koei Tecmo is talking about deliberately keeping games smaller. The question of why Japan is not experiencing what the rest of the world is experiencing is worth asking seriously. Amir Satvat, the man who has been tracking gaming layoffs since 2022, has some answers — and they’re not complicated.
The Scale of What’s Happening in the West
Satvat’s ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker is the most comprehensive public record of gaming industry job losses available. As of mid-September 2026, his data puts the cumulative total at 57,628 layoffs between 2022 and 2026 — with 2024 being the single worst year at 15,631 cuts. In 2026, confirmed layoffs have already hit 10,318 with the full-year projection sitting around 13,800 after recent forecasts moderated slightly.
The regional breakdown is what makes the picture stark. In 2026, 96% of all gaming industry job losses were concentrated in North America and Europe. North America alone accounts for 66% of all layoff events and 79% of affected workers. And within North America, California specifically accounted for more than half of all global gaming layoffs during one 12-to-18-month stretch.
“I think this is as bad as the ’83 crash if you’re a game developer based in North America or western Europe, in a traditional triple-A studio,” Satvat told Edge magazine. “That is ground zero for the destruction.”
For context: the 1983 crash wiped out the North American home console market almost entirely. Atari collapsed. Store shelves filled with unsellable games. Nintendo rebuilt the market from scratch with tight quality control and a single, focused hardware platform. The parallel being drawn is not casual.
Epic’s Tim Sweeney, speaking in the same Edge magazine feature, was equally direct: “This is the worst videogame crash, or disruption, that we’ve seen since the 1980s.” Sweeney added that AI infrastructure demand has begun outbidding the entire entertainment industry for memory and components, with RAM and storage prices quadrupling — creating an additional cost pressure that studios were already struggling to manage.
One asterisk worth noting: the global games industry workforce has actually grown very modestly in total headcount since 2022. But that growth is entirely coming from regions outside North America and western Europe. The jobs lost in California and London are being created in Vietnam, Turkey, and elsewhere. The crisis is geographic — if you’re in a traditional AAA studio in a Western market, you’re living through something categorically different from the picture that global aggregate numbers suggest.
Why Japan Is Different
Satvat is careful to say Japan isn’t a utopia. Layoffs do happen, and when Japanese publishers need to remove costs from the balance sheet, the typical approach is to target contractors based outside of Japan first, protecting core domestic staff. It’s not a system that entirely escapes cuts — it just absorbs them differently.
But the structural differences between how Japanese studios operate and how Western AAA studios operate are significant, and Satvat outlines them clearly.
Smaller, Leaner Teams
The Western AAA model over the past decade has trended toward massive team sizes. Games like Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 2042, and Skull and Bones were built by teams of 500-plus people, with enormous infrastructure behind them. When those games underperform or get cancelled, the jobs attached to those teams don’t disappear quietly — they become headline layoffs involving hundreds of people simultaneously.
Japanese studios never moved in that direction at the same scale. “My understanding is that, generally, Japanese teams tend to be much smaller and leaner,” Satvat told Edge. Capcom’s recent output — Pragmata, Resident Evil Requiem, the ongoing success of Monster Hunter — comes from teams that are large by any reasonable measure but modest compared to Western counterparts. The same goes for Konami’s ongoing output and Nintendo’s game development structure, where teams stay focused and are rarely ballooned past what the project requires.
Refusing to Chase Live-Service Trends
The live-service gold rush defined Western AAA development for most of the 2020s. Studios that had no business making persistent online games pivoted to chase Fortnite’s success. The results are well documented: Babylon’s Fall, Redfall, XDefiant, Skull and Bones, The Day Before — live-service games that failed quickly, taking entire studios with them. Even Bungie, the creator of Destiny, couldn’t sustain the model, ultimately ending Destiny 2 and struggling to find its footing with Marathon.
Japanese studios largely sat this trend out. “They didn’t get swept up in the live-service trend, or into these mega-blockbusters with 500-person teams,” Satvat noted. Nintendo has never chased a Fortnite competitor. Capcom makes sequels to beloved franchises with disciplined scope. Konami’s recent recovery has been driven by focused sports titles and survival horror, not live-service pivots. The result is that they never built up the organizational bloat that needs to be cut when those bets don’t pay off.
Executive Compensation
This is the number that stops conversations. Satvat raised it directly: “The executive salaries. They still make great money, but it’s two or three million dollars, not 30 million.”
The contrast in reality is sharper than even that framing suggests. Nintendo’s president Shuntaro Furukawa received $2 million in total compensation. EA’s CEO Andrew Wilson received $38.6 million — roughly 19 times more than the head of the world’s most consistently successful game company, and about 305 times the median EA employee salary. Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick earned $42.1 million in 2022, a figure that has almost certainly increased since. Both EA and Take-Two made significant cuts to their workforces this year.
The math isn’t subtle. Tens of millions of dollars in annual executive compensation is money that, in a leaner structure, could fund multiple development roles. It also reflects a broader cultural difference in how Japanese companies view the relationship between leadership compensation and workforce stability. The gap between what a CEO earns and what front-line developers earn is simply smaller at major Japanese studios — and that structural compression appears to have real effects on how companies respond to pressure.
The Studios That Show It Works
The evidence for Satvat’s argument isn’t just theoretical. Capcom has been on an extraordinary run. Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata, and Onimusha have all landed well critically and commercially, and the company continues to report record-breaking financial results. Nintendo recently became the best-selling console manufacturer in history, with Switch surpassing the DS — and that’s before Switch 2 has fully hit its stride. Koei Tecmo has publicly stated it believes in deliberately smaller titles as the engine of its continued success, effectively positioning itself as the opposite of the Western AAA trend.
Meanwhile, Bungie is struggling to make Marathon work after shutting down Destiny 2, Nintendo just launched one of the year’s best-reviewed games in Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, and the contrast between the two companies’ trajectories in 2026 is about as clean an illustration of Satvat’s thesis as you could ask for.
Is There a Fix?
Satvat is careful not to oversimplify. There’s no single solution to what’s happening in Western games development — the causes are multiple and interconnected: pandemic-era overhiring, rising development costs, a streaming and subscription economy that changed how players pay for games, AI infrastructure costs pressuring hardware, and a generation of executives who got rich betting on live-service trends that didn’t pan out at the expected scale.
But the Japanese model at least offers a coherent alternative framework: stay small, stay focused, pay your developers fairly relative to leadership, and don’t chase trends outside your core competency. The games that players actually want to play tend to come from studios that know what they’re good at and keep doing it — and those studios tend to be the ones with the healthiest employment records.
Whether Western studios can actually adopt those principles given shareholder expectations, executive incentive structures, and the momentum of existing business models is a harder question. But if the last four years of data have established anything, it’s that the current model has a very high human cost — and that cost is being paid almost entirely by developers in North America and western Europe while studios elsewhere continue building games without the same level of disruption. The biggest financial event in gaming history is two months away, and it’s being made by one of the few Western studios that has largely avoided mass layoffs — because Rockstar has kept its teams focused, its development long-term, and its ambitions matched to its actual structure. Whether the rest of the industry takes notes remains to be seen.
