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If there is one consistent story in gaming over the past few years, it has been the near-constant layoffs that have hit the industry. There has barely been a month that has passed without a studio shutting down or laying people off. In January 2025, Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia maker Ubisoft closed one of its UK-based development studios, something that the managing director of the publisher’s remaining UK studio has highlighted the need for “maturity” in the game development workforce.

Lisa Opie, managing director of Ubisoft Reflections studio in Newcastle, UK, explained that the instability in the gaming industry had instilled a greater understanding of the business side of game development in their staff. “There’s a maturity that we need to find within our workforce and within our approach,” she explained in an interview with The Game Business. “And within our sector and business that enables us to adjust to those market shifts.”

Opie reflected on how her time working in television production differed from her time leading a gaming studio. Particularly, staff at film and TV studios are more connected to the business outcomes of their work – and feel any slowdown in their industry more quickly. “In the game sector, where there’s a much less flexible workforce, plus video games take quite a long time to make, you can have a cushioning,” she said. “I think what you can see at the moment is people waking up to the fact that there are commercial challenges in our sector that are driving what is happening.”

Personally, we think that game developers have had a pretty good idea of the uncertainties in the gaming industry and it might be slightly insulting to imply otherwise. After all, it tends to be the staff that lose their jobs rather than executives and directors like Lisa Opie. “These aren’t personal decisions we’re making,” Opie said of the layoffs that she’s overseen this year, which resulted in an entire studio being closed and those at another studio losing their jobs. “We’re making decisions because the whole sector is shifting around us and we need to change. It’s difficult. It’s challenging. But that is the reality. At the end of the day, we have to be driven by the players who buy our games.”

We’re sure that it felt somewhat personal to those who lost their jobs, but we understand that, even before Trump threw the gaming industry into chaos with arbitrary and costly tariffs, things were tough for game developers who went through massive expansion during the 2020 pandemic and are now feeling the crunch from that decision.

We also understand that implying that employees don’t understand the business side of their industry when they have always been the most vulnerable to changes in the market is probably not a great look for a director at Ubisoft, a huge game developer and publisher that has let go nearly 200 people this year alone.

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