Gaming studio BioWare announced last week that it had shifted focus to the next “Mass Effect” game and would not “require support from the full studio.”
That’s a soft way to describe job cuts. As reported by Bloomberg Friday, more than 20 workers were laid off and others had been transferred to sister studios at parent EA. BioWare’s most recent game, “Dragon Age: The Veilguard,” underperformed EA’s expectations last fall and many of its developers were among those who lost jobs or were moved elsewhere. BioWare’s team is now less than 100 people.
The pain of 14,000-plus layoffs across the games industry worldwide last year is far from over as GDC 2025 gears up for its March 17 kickoff. But GDC’s own survey of developers in January didn’t paint a new picture of stability.
As many as one in 10 developers surveyed said they had been laid off in the past year, per the GDC study.
Interestingly, narrative design roles at studios ranked highest among layoffs reported in the survey.
After narrative design, roles in production, team management and visual arts saw the most cuts, while programmers, engineers and game designers weren’t affected as heavily. Jobs on the business and finance side saw the least number of cuts over the past year.
The effect of job reductions was evident in other parts of GDC’s survey. When prompted on studio size, 21% of respondents said they worked by themselves, as opposed to 18% who said they worked at studios with more than 500 employees.
Those lone developers were the most common respondents in the survey, while 32% of overall respondents said they worked at indie studios, more than double the share of people who listed AAA studios as their employers.
One could argue the combination of reduced resources at AAA studios and those now working solo or on very small teams is a use case for generative AI, but the survey indicates it’s far from that simple. While 36% of respondents said they use generative AI tools, 30% saw the tech as having a negative effect on the gaming industry, an increase from 18% who felt that way a year ago.
Even more fascinating is who uses generative AI the most.
More than half of workers on the business and finance side of gaming reported using generative AI tech the most, significantly more than those in production and team leadership, who were second among the respondents. Likewise, workers in community management, marketing and PR ranked third, rather than workers on the actual programming, engineering and game-design side.
The fabric of the broader video game market is still shifting. Hideaki Nishino was made the sole CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment last week, with former co-CEO Hermen Hulst stepping back into running the studio and development side without his C-suite designation. PlayStation continues to struggle getting live services off the ground, having canceled several of those games.
As many as 42% of respondents in the GDC survey said they do not want to work on a live service title as their next game. When the industry converges again next month, such sentiments and skepticism over the direction of publishing giants should be top of mind.