Battlefield 6 sold seven million copies worldwide. It was 2025's best-selling game in the United States. By any conventional measure, it was a roaring commercial success. Then EA laid off staff from the franchise.
This isn't an anomaly. It's become the gaming industry's defining pattern. Global games revenue hit an all-time high of $195.6 billion in 2025, yet roughly one-third of American game workers were laid off in the past two years. The industry is simultaneously celebrating record financial success and destroying careers at the highest rate in its history.
Something fundamental is broken with how the gaming industry measures success.
The Metrics Lie
When executives trumpet record revenue and record sales figures, they're telling part of the story. They're not telling you about the thousands of experienced developers now looking for work. They're not mentioning that 70% of developers have serious concerns about the sustainability of live service games, the business model that increasingly drives industry profits. They're not acknowledging that pandemic-era growth expectations created a financial house of cards that's now collapsing.
The disconnect is staggering. A single live service game like Fortnite can generate $1.2 billion in revenue. But that revenue doesn't translate to job security. Instead, it incentivises chasing the next Fortnite, burning through massive development budgets, and cutting staff when the inevitable slowdown arrives. For workers, record company revenue means nothing if their studio is next on the layoff list.
What Australian Workers Face
For Australian game developers, the situation is even more precarious. The local industry has fewer than 1,500 full-time developers, and salaries average between $90,000 and $110,000 annually. That's competitive for the Australian market but masks a profession already dealing with unpaid overtime, sham contracting, and job insecurity. Game Workers Australia, the country's first union for game developers, exists precisely because the industry hasn't regulated itself.
Recent unionization efforts at major studios tell you everything you need to know about worker confidence. Workers at Heart Machine, the studio behind Hyper Light Drifter, secured union recognition with the Communications Workers of America in 2026. This followed repeated layoff rounds and the cancellation of their Hyper Light Breaker early access project. They unionized because working in games no longer felt secure.
Why the Model Keeps Failing
The problem runs deeper than any single company's mismanagement. The gaming industry bet heavily during the pandemic that growth would never stop. It built studios expecting sustained expansion, greenlit expensive projects, and hired aggressively. When pandemic growth normalised and live service player bases stabilised, the industry was left massively over-extended.
Live service games compound this issue. The model demands constant content updates, ongoing live ops, and new monetisation hooks to keep players paying. It's extraordinarily expensive to operate sustainably. When a live service game slows (as nearly all eventually do), studios face a brutal choice: invest more money hoping for a revival, or shut it down and consolidate staff.
Meanwhile, smaller, independent studios face a different trap. To compete, they need to launch live service games with AAA production values. The upfront costs are enormous. Success is increasingly rare. Failure means closure.
Measuring What Actually Matters
Here's what an honest industry metric would look like. Not revenue per employee, but job stability per revenue dollar. Not peak concurrent players, but average tenure of the workforce. Not quarterly earnings, but whether a studio that ships a commercial hit can keep the team that built it.
The gaming industry celebrates metrics that don't reflect real health. Record sales? Meaningless if they don't fund sustainable employment. All-time revenue? Worthless if it results in all-time job losses. These figures tell investors the industry is booming. They tell workers nothing except that their jobs are temporary and their value is disposable.
Workers at Heart Machine, at Bungie, at Activision Blizzard, and across the industry are responding by organising. They're demanding clarity on what sustainability actually looks like. They're rejecting the idea that record company success requires their sacrifice.
The gaming industry needs to redefine what victory means. Not higher revenue, but longer careers. Not bigger sales, but worker retention. Not more games launched, but games that matter, made by people who can afford to stay in the industry and build something real.
Record sales are meaningless without sustainable jobs. The industry is measuring everything except the only thing that truly matters.