For over a year now, video game workers have been crushed by one mass layoff after another. And both CEOs and mainstream media insist that this is just the norm in a “fundamentally unstable” industry.

“The state for workers in the industry is the worst it’s ever been,” longtime game developer Kai — a pseudonym — told Jacobin. Having worked fairly consistently in video games since the 1990s at both big-name companies and smaller outfits, Kai was recently laid off along with their colleagues when their studio unceremoniously shuttered. “Even when you believe you’ve found yourself the right job, it can evaporate in an instant, and then you are suddenly competing against hundreds or thousands of people for every job position,” Kai said.

Approximately twenty thousand people have lost their jobs in game development since 2023 alone. To an untrained eye, mass layoffs may indicate a crisis in profitability, but video game companies are actually doing quite well. Revenues surpass those of the music and film industries combined by over a hundred billion dollars. A single game, Grand Theft Auto V, released over a decade ago, continues to rake in millions of dollars a year and has netted its developer, Rockstar Games, over $8.9 billion.