At GDC in San Francisco, former Blizzard chief creative officer Rob Pardo delivered the annual keynote address, drawing on a decades-long career that includes landmark titles like StarCraft: Brood War, Warcraft 3, and the World of Warcraft franchise. But his message on stage wasn't about cutting-edge design techniques or the latest game engines. It was about something far simpler: don't fire your winners.
Pardo directed his closing remarks at industry executives, arguing that if developers have already delivered a success, the best way to repeat it is by keeping those developers on payroll. "Treasure that team, nurture that team, give them the autonomy to keep taking care of the players," he said. "Because the thing that made the game special in the first place is the people who built it."
The timing of this advice couldn't be sharper. After two consecutive years of devastating layoffs and closures at global game studios, what developers need most now may not be technical lectures but rather how to find the next round of funding and publishers. According to GDC's newly released 2025 State of the Game Industry report, 11% of the 3,000 developers surveyed were laid off over the past 12 months, and overall 41% of game developers were impacted by layoffs this year, either by being laid off themselves or having cuts affect their teams.
Pardo's argument rests on a point many executives overlook: successful games aren't just the product you ship, they're the accumulated knowledge of the team that built it. Behind every successful game lies a development cycle with its own series of unforeseeable setbacks, well-intentioned missteps, and necessity-driven solutions, and players only see the results of that work; all the mistakes, the learning, and the north stars that led the team to the final product are long buried.
Pardo offered Warcraft 3 as an example, noting that Blizzard's initial concept was even more focused on heroes and smaller-scale conflict, something the team eventually had to admit wasn't working. While that original concept was abandoned, its successful elements became some of Warcraft 3's defining features.
The hidden cost of layoffs, then, is the loss of that institutional knowledge. When a studio cuts a team that's just delivered a hit, the company loses not just workers but the specific experience and problem-solving muscle that made that game possible. Critics have pointed out that layoffs are often handled poorly, with some developers feeling that companies prioritized executive salaries and unnecessary expenses over investing in game development, with instances where studios spent extravagantly on events or office perks shortly before laying off a significant portion of their workforce.
What makes Pardo's message particularly relevant is what he observed during his keynote about the unpredictability of success. Throughout his hour-long address, Pardo reiterated that despite working on some of history's most celebrated, enduring games, even he cannot say with certainty what makes a hit. If even a legendary designer can't guarantee success, the argument follows, why not protect the teams that have already proven they can deliver? The variable isn't the next idea; it's the people.
Developers surveyed by GDC attributed the rise in layoffs to issues like Covid-era overexpansion, rising production costs, declining player interest, unrealistic expectations for the next big hit, and poor leadership and mismanagement. Pardo's keynote suggests that at least some of these problems stem not from economics alone but from short-term thinking about human capital.
The challenge, of course, is that this advice runs directly counter to how much of the gaming industry operates. When quarterly earnings matter more than long-term team stability, when investors demand rapid returns, and when a single underperforming title can trigger widespread cuts, Pardo's case for patience and team loyalty becomes something of a luxury position. Yet it's also a challenge worth taking seriously, because the cost of getting it wrong has rippled across the entire industry for more than two years.