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Over 5,000 games industry workers have already lost their jobs in 2024
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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Without knowing how many people are in the industry, this is hard to quantify. As I'm not in the business myself, I don't have any way to gauge.
If there are 5,000 job loses and there are only 50,000 people in the industry, that's very significant and points to extremely serious industry issues.
If there's 5,000 job loses and there's 5,000,000 people in the industry, that's more of a drop in the ocean, and while it would suck for the people involved, such job cuts wouldn't point to any issues within the industry in and of themselves.
In that latter case, it could simply mean that some individual companies are downsizing and shifting gears to weather economic issues.
Obviously these job loses are a problem, I just wish articles like this would provide that much needed context.
This article compares the number of layoffs this year to last year, and makes a big deal about it. But that tells us NOTHING. That's just comparing two arbitrary numbers in a vacuum.
What I mean is - If the layoffs last year were 5 people, and this year so far it was 20, their headline would be "2024 layoffs QUADRUPLE in January alone!!!".
So, the comparison they're making isn't very informative in a vacuum. Is the number of layoffs they're referencing from last year significant for the industry compared to previous years/decades, or close to average, or....?
What we need here is context and more depth of information in order to develop an understanding of the significance of this data and come to some conclusions.
And of course, it goes without saying that it sucks people are losing their jobs and having their lives thrown up in the air like this, regardless of the industry they work in. I wish them the best in landing on their feet.
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