According to a new interview with Amir Satvat, Tencent’s former Business Development Director and the mind behind ASGC’s Games Industry Layoffs Tracker, Japanese studios such as Capcom, Konami, and Nintendo have “staff retention of 97 percent plus.” How? Because they make wild business decisions such as not paying executives tens of millions in bonuses and producing popular games.
Satvat recently sat down with Edge magazine (via GamesRadar) to shed some light on the scope of the layoff-shaped problem that the video game industry is currently facing. Satvat has been operating ASGC’s Games Industry Layoffs Tracker since 2022, which means that he’s in a uniquely qualified position to explain exactly how screwed the industry is.
Based on his current data, Satvat estimates that 14,500 total video game workers will lose their jobs in 2026. However, Satvat also stated that “something like 18,000 to 25,000 people are getting new jobs in games every year.” If you do some quick math, that almost doesn’t sound right, as it would mean we’re up by a minimum of 3,500 hires. Hard to believe, considering all of the massive layoffs we keep hearing about, such as the 1,600 job losses that hit Xbox in July of this year, with another 1,600 planned within a year of those.
This also seems to directly contradict Edge’s previous interview with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who stated that we are currently barreling towards “the worst videogame crash, or disruption, that we’ve seen since the 1980s.”
According to Sweeney, the industry’s “unprecedented wave of investment in building AI systems and data centres” will cause a recession akin to the great video game crash of 1983, which resulted in home console revenue dropping by a whopping 97 percent in 1985 and hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs. So, does Satvat’s data mean Sweeney was off the mark? Yes and no, because there’s an outlier here that’s throwing off the curve: Japan.
“Japan is a completely different ballgame…” Satvat revealed. “Everyone calls out Nintendo, but you can look at Konami or Capcom – these companies all have staff retention of 97 percent plus.”
What’s Japan doing right that everywhere else is doing wrong? Satvat believes the contrast is due to both Japanese teams being “much smaller and leaner,” and said studios paying their executives smaller salaries: “They still make great money, but it’s two or three million dollars, not 30 million.”
Likewise, he also theorized that, as Japanese studios “didn’t get swept up in the live-service trend, or into these mega-blockbusters with 500-person teams,” they’ve also incurred fewer losses. He might be onto something there, as while there are outliers, such as PlatinumGames’ Babylon’s Fall, the live-service graveyard is relatively devoid of Japanese-developed titles.
If I’m picking up what Satvat is putting down, it almost sounds like taking gambles on big-budget titles in a hit-or-miss genre is dangerous, whereas Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom’s strategy of releasing sequels to well-established IPs is safe and profitable. Who knew?