Game job aggregator Amir Satvat estimated 4,463 additional people will be laid off in 2024, but he noted the rate of layoffs is slowing.
Satvat been aggregating game job data since 2022, and he has helped about 2,000 people find jobs. He now has confidence that he can predict how many additional people will be laid off in 2024. That number, sadly, is 4,463 people.
That will bring the total cuts for the year to 15,742 people in 2024, Satvat said in a post as part of what he calls Project Flagpole. And so far, 11,279 people have been laid off through July 6. That number already exceeds the 10,500 laid off from game jobs in 2023, according to the Game Industry Layoff Tracker.
But there is some good news. Last week, Satvat said he began to see the market change toward more hiring and less firing, and he estimates the number of people being fired will be exceeded by the number of people being hired by September.
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In addition, since more than 11,000 people have been laid off in 2024’s first half and Satvat estimates more than 4,400 will be laid off in the second half, this means the rate of layoffs is slowing down. That is welcome news.
Satvat’s forecast is likely to be inexact. But it’s a remarkable bit of transparency in an industry full of companies who are not at all transparent in the same way. Satvat says that his forecast is based on historical data and millions of pieces of data points that he has reviewed or created since 2022.
“If you ask what number of additional layoffs I would be happy with, the answer is always ZERO,” he said in a post on LinkedIn.
Satvat’s efforts to post job resources and provide mentors have helped more than 2,000 people find jobs so far.
He added, “However, if you’re asking for a ‘baseline’ figure of what I expect and model off of, that feeds everything I share in Project Flagpole and more, the forecast for the period from July 7, 2024, through December 31, 2024, is 4,463 additional people.”
And he said, “I sincerely hope that I am wrong and that we see significantly fewer layoffs. But this is my best estimate as of today. I have enough data to share this projection with confidence and will keep you updated as time goes on. I have been working on a 2025 projection for some time as well but I don’t have enough statistical confidence to present the results yet.”
