July 6, 2026: One year later, we've taken stock of the industry's latest decimation strategies and updated our list of techniques accordingly.
"In these trying economic times, it is tempting to visit the website LinkedIn.com in search of employment in the videogame business," we wrote on PC Gamer in July 2025. "On that dread portal one can find an endless parade of hucksters and hustlers promising they're guarding the secret to success: a guaranteed six-figure career is just one $299.99 seminar away!
"Here on the trusty ship PC Gamer we make no such outlandish promises, instead offering more practical advice: How to get laid off from whatever games industry job you already have."
In light of Microsoft's announcement that it will lay off another 3,200 Xbox employees, it's come to our attention that as many as tens—perhaps even hundreds—of game developers around the world somehow remain gainfully employed worldwide. Embarrassing! Surely at this point they must still have jobs against their best efforts, because it's never been easier to successfully get shitcanned by someone who makes an "awooga" noise when the profit line goes up at a steeper angle.
Initially we provided 20 foolproof techniques so that anyone could find the path to joblessness that was right for them. We earnestly believed that any developer with a little tenacity and a bit of hard work could use these tips to join the vaunted ranks of the approximately 8,000 developers laid off in 2026, and the roughly 43,000 since 2022 who have accomplished the lifelong dream of being considered too costly to employ in an industry that generates more than $100 billion every year.
Spurred by Microsoft and the other major developers who have recently cut their workforces to the bone and then straight through it, we've revised our list with some avant-garde techniques that have emerged in the past 12 months.
Behold, then, our newly revised guide: 25 foolproof ways to get laid off in the videogame industry.
PC Gamer's definitive (but by no means exhaustive) list of ways to lose your job in the videogame industry—guaranteed!
🚨🚨Hot new tips for 2026!! 🚨🚨
- Make one of the most acclaimed and successful multiplayer videogames of all time while your bosses somehow squander $3.6 billion
- Have your boss's misunderstood masterpiece derailed by saboteurs. Saboteurs!!
- Ensure that after a once-in-a-lifetime hit, your company quadruples down and puts all its eggs in the endless growth metaverse basket
- Make an earnest attempt to stand up for yourself and your colleagues, which your employers will spin as "gross misconduct"
- Work for Microsoft
Tried-and-true techniques
- Work at a company whose "platform, hardware, and game roadmap have never looked stronger"
- Make a game that does so well that it's called a "break out hit" by the company that hired you to make it
- Work for a publisher that decides your game is dead less than three months after your boss insists "the game is absolutely not dying"
- Follow up a critically acclaimed game about skateboarding with a critically acclaimed game about rollerblading before your publisher decides it needs to "rationalize its pipeline"
- Make a game that doesn't do well, probably because of decisions made by your boss, boss's boss, and/or boss's boss's boss
- Help make a game as successful as Marvel Rivals, but as part of a team that does not fit into new plans for "optimized development efficiency"
- Work at a studio that gets acquired for over $60 billion dollars, none of which ends up in your pocket
- Endure executive pressure that forces your studio into making a game it isn't well-suited to (it is then shut down)
- Work at a studio that can't get funding despite being founded by an industry veteran
- Work at a company that needs to become more flexible/agile/versatile under these trying economic conditions. (Meanwhile, your CEO might've spent $2 million on vintage cars)
- Have a boss who wears a really bad hat on stage
- Go on strike because your bosses want you to train your AI replacement
- Fail to meet unrealistic sales expectations after your game has been de-prioritized and your studio mismanaged
- Get hoovered up by a company whose spending spree turns out to be reliant on Saudi Arabia forking out $2,000,000,000 (and then it doesn't do that)
- Believe a tech company that it's serious about funding games for its new platform that no one wants. (It will change its mind before you have enough time to finish a game)
- Have a boss who declares that a leak of "non-public information" about your in-development game was so dire, the whole studio's gotta go
- Uh oh, your CEO is high on AI! Should've seen that coming
- Write the best character in a long-running and much beloved RPG series
- Just, uh, write a character at all
- Have the hubris to try to make a videogame. What were you thinking?
Read More
- One third of US games industry workers were laid off in the last 2 years, 2026 GDC survey says
- The grim industry summer continues as EA lays off staff ahead of $55 billion sale to Saudi Arabia, likely to soothe the sting of its $20 billion debt
- 'Generational talent just gone': Developers react in shock at the brutal scale of Bungie layoffs, which has reportedly seen the Destiny 2 team almost completely wiped out
- Ubisoft closes another 2 studios, lays off hundreds more employees
- Epic devs discuss the shock of mass layoffs: 'We only had a slight hint that the company revenue wasn't doing well'
- Microsoft's year of shame
- Bluepoint Games, Sony's famed remaster studio, is being closed as the fallout from PlayStation's disastrous pivot to live service continues
- Rockstar accused of 'the most ruthless act of union busting in the history of the UK games industry' after firing dozens of employees who were allegedly attempting to form a union
- The impact of 16,000 games industry layoffs, in one chart
After 2024, it feels like the games industry is poised for a vibe shift—or maybe a reckoning
