With several companies from across the gaming industry suffering, analyst Amir Satvat believes that companies from Japan are doing better than their Western counterparts for many reasons, like infrequent layoffs, having smaller teams, and not having large salaries for their executives. Speaking to Edge magazine (via GamesRadar), Satvat spoke about his initial projections about layoffs between 2022 and 2026, and how the industry has still managed to grow.
Having projected 57,628 job losses for the period, Satvat has now noted that a similar number of jobs have also been created. This has led to the industry growing “very modestly, by a small number of thousands of people.” Satvat’s ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker has noted that 66 percent of the layoffs between 2022 and 2026 happened in North America, affecting 79 percent of the industry’s workforce. North America and Europe together seemingly account for 96 percent of all layoffs across the industry.
“There was a 12-to-18-month period where I estimated that over half of layoffs, globally, were in California,” explained Satvat. “I think this is as bad as the ’83 crash if you’re a game developer based in North America or western Europe, in a traditional triple-A studio. That is ground zero for the destruction.”
Japan, on the other hand, is seemingly doing much better. “Everyone calls out Nintendo, but you can look at Konami or Capcom – these companies all have staff retention of 97 per cent plus. My understanding is that, generally, Japanese teams tend to be much smaller and leaner. They didn’t get swept up in the live-service trend, or into these mega-blockbusters with 500-person teams.” The country also noted that while executives in Japanese gaming companies “still make great money”, they don’t tend to make as much as, for example, EA CEO Andrew Wilson, who made almost $40 million in the last fiscal year. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa, in contrast, made $2 million.
Satvat’s mention of the video game crash of 1983 is also worth noting, since even that largely revolved around Western markets for the gaming industry collapsing due to a number of factors. The industry was largely revived only thanks to Japanese companies like Nintendo entering the market with their at-the-time brand-new console, the Nintendo Entertainment System.
The modern games industry might bear a striking resemblance to the crash, with many Western companies going through hardships, leading to several layoffs and potential studio closures. On the other hand, the popularity of games made by Japanese teams is quite high again, and companies like Capcom have even ended up releasing four critically acclaimed games in 2026 alone.
As for Western studios, Build a Rocket Boy went through a fresh round of layoffs, and questions have now popped up about the studio’s overall survival. Similarly, DON’T NOD announced a massive restructuring that will result in job cuts, with its survival beyond January 2027 having “material uncertainty”. And lest we forget, Microsoft went through massive layoffs just a couple of months ago with around 1,600 cuts, and another 1,600 planned for the rest of the fiscal year.
