When every applicant is experienced

The layoffs do not feel temporary anymore. In games, they have become part of the weather.

That is what makes this moment so difficult to talk about. The shock has not fully gone away, but neither has the pattern. In GDC’s 2025 State of the Game Industry survey, 11 percent of developers said they had been laid off in the previous year, while 41 percent said they had been affected directly or indirectly. The 2026 survey showed that the pressure had not eased, with 28 percent of respondents reporting layoffs in the previous two years and half saying their current or most recent employer had carried out layoffs in the past 12 months.

That matters for diversity and inclusion because layoffs do not just remove people from teams. They reshape the market. Once enough experienced people are forced back into the job search, the applicant pool changes character. Entry-level candidates are no longer only competing against their peers. They are competing alongside people with ten, fifteen, or twenty years in the business, people who have already shipped games, led teams, and built careers that suddenly need rebuilding. The 2025 GDC report even noted that many of the survey’s “N/A” responses came from students and graduates who were struggling to find jobs in the current market, which says a great deal about how difficult the door has become to open in the first place.

That shift has a real impact on inclusion. A lot of diversity work depends on entry points, not because underrepresented people belong only at the start of a career, but because early careers are often where access is won or lost. If the industry stops making room for juniors, it also weakens one of the main routes through which women and other underrepresented groups have historically entered games. Research on women’s paths into game development has pointed to a pipeline that can quietly disadvantage women, which makes those first openings especially important.

The numbers around representation underline the same point. Women in Games responded to the 2026 GDC report by noting that women still make up roughly a quarter of the workforce, with the report showing 24 percent women, 64 percent men, and 8 percent non-binary respondents. Their warning was clear: in a period of instability, progress can stall very quickly if studios do not act deliberately.

Layoffs can also hit underrepresented workers more hard than the headline numbers suggest. Take This found in its analysis of industry layoffs that women made up 37 percent of the layoffs in the sample they studied, a higher share than would be expected relative to representation in the industry. That does not mean every layoff is discriminatory, but it does show how easily instability can deepen existing imbalance. When an industry is already uneven, broad cuts do not land evenly.

The cultural effect is just as important as the statistical one. In a market flooded with experienced applicants, studios often start hiring more defensively. They want people who can plug a gap immediately, who need less training, who already know the tools, who will feel safer to choose when budgets are tight and timelines are shorter than ever. That instinct is understandable, but it comes with a cost. It makes hiring more dependent on established networks and familiar profiles, and that usually means the same kinds of teams get rebuilt again and again.

This is why the current period feels bigger than a labour market problem. It is a question about what the industry is quietly choosing to protect when everything is under pressure. Experience matters. So does stability. So does keeping the lights on. But if the only people who can get through the door are the ones who already look like the people who were there before, then the industry is not really renewing itself. It is narrowing itself. And narrowing has a way of showing up later in the work, in the culture, and in who still feels that games has room for them.