Labor Market Trends 2025: The Gaming Industry

Labor market trends in the gaming industry have been a bit unpredictable in 2025. Talk to anyone in a studio, and you’ll hear a different version of what’s going on. Some say hiring feels slow, others say they’re suddenly scrambling to fill roles, and a few aren’t sure what to make of the shifts at all. AI tools are showing up everywhere, sometimes helping, sometimes confusing workflows, and remote teams are still figuring out how to work together without losing momentum.

What stands out through all of this, though, is that companies haven’t stopped looking for talent. The types of roles they prioritize keep moving around, but the need hasn’t vanished. It’s just taking new shapes as the industry tries to steady itself after a strange couple of years.

The Evolution of the Gaming Industry Labor Market

The global gaming industry has seen rapid expansion in recent years, surpassing Hollywood in the entertainment industry and staring down the barrel of a projected market valuation of $266 billion by 2028, while growing at a 5% CAGR (BCG). 

While a lot of the growth was seen during the CoVID-19 pandemic, the strong growth for the gaming industry was long expected. The post-pandemic period has proven quite challenging for the gaming industry labor market. While on one hand, the number of takers for gaming has come down, on the other hand, studios and publishers have also overhired and have put themselves in an unsustainable position.

All is not doom and gloom though. In 2025 alone, the industry reached a value of $221.24 billion (GlobeNewswire), driven by an expanding player base and advancements in immersive technologies. As gaming continues to redefine entertainment, labor market trends in this space are shifting dramatically.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the labor market trends in the gaming industry in 2025 and dive deeper into what we can expect going forward.

Rising Demand for Highly Skilled Gaming Professionals

Even with all the talk about layoffs and cutbacks, there’s still a steady need for skilled people in the gaming industry. It’s one of those things that doesn’t always show up in headlines, but you see it clearly when you look at the actual job postings. In 2025 alone, there were more than 109,000 openings tied to gaming roles, which says a lot about how the work itself hasn’t slowed down — just the way teams are built around it.

A big part of this demand comes from how fast the technology around game development is moving. VR and AR aren’t niche experiments anymore. Studios that barely considered immersive design a few years ago are suddenly trying to figure out how to incorporate XR features into their games. And with that shift comes the need for people who understand machine learning, procedural generation, cloud-based rendering, and all the other tools that make these newer experiences possible.

Newzoo’s projection that the XR gaming market will hit $11.5 billion this year pretty much explains why developers with immersive-tech experience are being picked up quickly. There just aren’t enough of them, and the ones who have even a year or two of hands-on work in XR pipelines find themselves suddenly in high demand.

The roles that stand out the most right now are the ones that sit right at the intersection of creativity and engineering — AI engineers, technical artists, gameplay programmers, systems designers. Studios are looking for people who can work in these hybrid spaces because development cycles are changing, and the old “hand everything off to the next team in the pipeline” approach isn’t really how things work anymore.

There’s also a bit of a gap in the market. The skill sets needed today didn’t exist at this scale even a few years ago, so there’s not a huge pool of mid-level or senior talent. That shortage is driving salaries up for certain roles and making competition for the right people surprisingly intense — even among studios that are being cautious with their budgets.

The short version? The gaming industry may be rethinking how it hires, but it definitely hasn’t stopped hiring. The priority has just moved to highly specialized roles that can support the next wave of game technology.

Key Labor Market Trends in the Gaming Industry

1. Rising Demand for Skilled Professionals

The demand for gaming professionals remains high, with over 109,000 gaming jobs posted in 2025, reflecting sustained hiring needs in game development, design, and engineering (JobsPikr).

The rise of VR, AR, and AI-driven experiences has further increased demand for specialized talent in machine learning, procedural content generation, and cloud gaming. According to a report by Newzoo, the XR (extended reality) gaming market alone is expected to reach $11.5 billion by 2025, highlighting the need for developers skilled in immersive technologies.

2. Expanding Roles Beyond Development

While game developers and engineers remain central to the industry, there is a growing labor market trends curated by JobsPikr shows demand for roles in  marketing, customer support, design, direction and more.

The eSports market is expected to grow to $3.5 billion by 2025 (Newzoo), fueling the need for specialists who can engage players and audiences beyond the gameplay experience.

3. Industry-Wide Layoffs

An additional labor market trend, according to various sources, 2025 saw nearly 14,600 layoffs across game development studios and publishers, with over a third of the layoffs happening in January 2025 alone. Rising development costs, a weakening market in a post-pandemic world, changes in consumer preferences as well as several factors have been cited as reasons.

According to the 2024 Big Games Industry Employment Survey, HR, Recruiters, QA and Artists were the most likely to be laid off. Localization and Sound Specialists, Artists, QA, and Project Managers also reported feeling vulnerable.

4. The Ebbing Tide of AI

AI is also playing an increasingly transformative role in the gaming industry. For instance, as early as 2023, Activision began to use generative AI models to create concept art, user surveys and marketing material (source).

What’s more, in a report published by CVL Economics, nearly 90% of the gaming companies they surveyed reported the use of generative AI for various purposes.

According to Technavio, the AI in games market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 42.3% between 2025 and 2029, increasing in valuation by $27.47 billion.

Expanding Roles Beyond Development (Rewritten in Tone 2)

If you look at how studios are hiring this year, it’s pretty clear that game development isn’t the only area getting attention anymore. Coding and design will always be central, sure, but there’s a whole set of roles around them that have become just as important — sometimes even more so, depending on the studio and the kind of games they’re trying to make.

What’s interesting is how wide the spread is. Jobs tied to marketing, community management, player support, localization, content direction, live-ops, and analytics are all showing up more often. These are not the “nice to have” positions they used to be. With so many games now being updated constantly rather than released and forgotten, studios need people who understand players and can keep them engaged long after launch day.

The rise of eSports has played its own role here. With the eSports market expected to reach $3.5 billion in 2025, companies are looking for specialists who can handle broadcast production, manage competitive events, run partnerships, and build out the sort of behind-the-scenes operations that used to only exist in traditional sports. These aren’t fringe roles anymore; they’re core to how publishers think about their brand and their audience.

Another shift is happening around content design that isn’t strictly “inside the game.” Studios now want people who can shape how players see their world from the outside — social media strategists, video creators, narrative marketers, and others who help the studio’s personality show up everywhere players interact with it.

Taken together, these trends say something about where gaming is heading. It’s not just about building the game; it’s about building everything around the game — the community, the story, the events, the touchpoints, the ongoing relationship between players and the studio. And that means hiring people with a completely different set of skills than what you would have seen listed on job boards five or ten years ago.

The industry is still driven by developers, but the ecosystem around them has gotten a lot bigger — and that expansion is shaping what the labor market looks like today.

Gaming Industry-Wide Layoffs

You’ve probably heard the chatter around layoffs in gaming — and unlike a couple of years back when it was just a handful of studios trimming positions, 2025 has brought its own ups and downs there too. It hasn’t been a free-fall, but it hasn’t been a smooth year either.

A few trackers that follow industry cuts put the total number of job losses this year at around 3,500 to 6,200 across studios worldwide. One estimate from a layoff tracker that aggregates announcements and notices shows roughly 3,563 layoffs in gaming this year, while another community projection puts the broader total closer to around 6,247 when you count all reported cuts and transitions out of the sector.

And unlike the big headline grabs you see in general tech layoffs, the cuts in gaming haven’t been confined to one area. There have been reductions at large publishers, mid-size studios, and even indie teams that struggled with budget squeeze or project cancellations. For example, one major player in 2025 scaled back parts of its AAA development operations as it pivoted toward different strategies, affecting thousands of roles in its gaming division. Smaller cuts continue at studios like Eidos-Montréal, which has had multiple rounds of layoffs and project shifts this year.

It’s also clear that the impact of layoffs hasn’t been evenly spread. Reports tracking regional data suggest that North America has borne roughly 70 % of gaming layoffs, with states like California seeing a large share of the activity.

Here’s the thing: layoffs in 2025 aren’t exactly a new wave so much as a continuation of reshaping that started a few years ago and has been tapering off. Many companies that expanded rapidly during boom years found themselves with bigger teams than they needed once market dynamics shifted. What we’re seeing now are targeted cuts — not wholesale studio closures — and in a lot of cases, those who were laid off are still being picked up elsewhere, moving into adjacent roles, freelance work, or even other parts of tech.

So while layoffs are still part of the story this year, they’re not the dominant story — they’re one of the forces pushing companies to rethink hiring priorities and make smarter, more strategic decisions about who they bring on and why.

Sources:

• Layoff trackers estimate ~3,563 gaming layoffs in 2025.
• Alternate estimate suggests ~6,247 layoffs when accounting for broader industry cuts.
• Significant cuts in big tech gaming divisions (e.g., Amazon Games) impacted roles this year.
• North America accounts for the majority of gaming layoffs.

The Future of Gaming Jobs

The future of gaming employment looks promising, with investors and analysts confident that the industry will recover in the near future, particularly with the release of several big titles like Grand Theft Auto VI, as well as the release of new consoles like the Switch successor, by Nintendo. 

Analyst Matt Piscatella, in an article published by GamesIndustry.biz, expressed optimism for 2025. PwC, in fact, predicts that the gaming industry is expected to reach a value of $321 billion by 2026.

It’s also equally important to note that there’s a burgeoning unionization movement in the works. One the one hand Polygon noted that the systemic issues in the gaming industry cannot be expected to be fixed voluntarily. On the other hand, Epic’s CEO, Tim Sweeney, noted in a company email that they’d been spending more money than they earned for a while.” (Source).

Unionization would not only mean better bargaining power for employees, but also an avenue towards better working conditions, pay and benefits.

Unlock More Insights

While the information we’ve covered so far comes from in-depth research by analysts and journalists from around the world, a weapon in your arsenal should be labor market data. Take a deeper look at who was hiring in 2025, who they were looking for, and more via our report here.

JobsPikr provides AI-driven labor market trends that enables HR tech providers, talent intelligence firms, and workforce analysts to access real-time trends and insights. Leveraging JobsPikr gives businesses access to structured job market intelligence, workforce trends, and hiring analytics.

Why choose JobsPikr:

1. Keep an eye on your competition: JobsPikr curates data from over 80,000 sources. No matter who your competitors are and where they’re hiring, you’ll be the first to know.
2. Forecast what’s trending: Study how companies hired in the past and forecast what’s to come with historical data.
3. Paint a picture worth a thousand words: Visualize data inside JobsPikr. Create dashboards that tell the perfect story and share it with your stakeholders.
4. Identify skill gaps: Ensure you have a workforce that’s at the cutting edge. Identify what skills are in demand today.
5. Do it all yourself: JobsPikr is entirely self-serve, from sign up to business success. Specify exactly what you’re looking for and curate the data in a flash.

Sign up to JobsPikr here.

How the Gaming Industry Moves Forward

The gaming industry in 2025 isn’t collapsing or exploding; it’s adjusting. Teams are reorganizing, priorities are shifting, and the skills that matter most look a little different than they used to. Even with layoffs in some corners, the work hasn’t disappeared; it’s just being done in new ways, by people who can move comfortably between creative, technical, and AI-supported workflows.

What stands out when you step back is that the industry is still growing, just more thoughtfully. Studios are focusing on roles that support long-term development, live-ops, and emerging technologies, while workers themselves are pushing for better stability and clearer expectations. And with big releases and new hardware cycles on the horizon, hiring momentum is already building in places that were quiet not long ago.

The game industry isn’t moving backward; it’s evolving. And the companies and teams that pay attention to how these shifts show up in real job data will have a much easier time navigating whatever comes next.