Everyday there seems to be more news about another company laying off its workers. I believe there was a few recent articles talking about hiring. However, there seems to be a lot more lay offs than hiring news. Is this because of transition period? One would think they would be hiring or keeping their work force with all the systems that are out or coming out. What are your thoughts? Do you think any other major 3rd party companies will go under during the transition or next gen? I believe at least one major 3rd party company will go under next gen. I hope it will be EA.

Just wanted to add that it sucks being laid off. I've been laid off 3 times while working contract manufacturing in the past 3 years.

It's common in all markets that when revenue is down cuts come around. Hopefully this will be temporary and the upcoming consoles will open up new revenue streams and reignite consumer buying habits.

So are 3rd party companies going to try and cash out on the current gen while they mainly wait for user base to grow for the new systems. Perhaps trying a few new IPs on new systems along with mainly ports. Video game industry seems to be a little stagnate right now in terms of sales and ideas. Indie developers seem to be the only ones with decent new game ideas right now. 3rd party developers seem to be shitting out the sequels like Hollywood.

I suppose not too many people care about the lay offs or think it is anything serious. I suppose another couple major companies would have to go under. The only third party companies I care about are Capcom, Atlus, Sega and a few others. So I wouldn't mind if most of them just went away.

Namco-Bandai are expanding, which was pleasing to see in a wash of layoffs recently.

there are also always new jobs but nobody is talking about them because only bad news is interesting news. microsoft is hiring all the time. as example when disney said they close lucasarts, microsoft send recruiters there to get them. wasn't really in the news and they alone got maybe a lot of the staff. i think ubisoft could probably also expand, kojima said that they expand and crytek and cd projekt got a lot of new employees and so on...

sure right now there are also a lot of lay-offs, some concepts didn't work (especially in the social game segment some failed hard becaused they thought it will be super easy to make money), indie developers are everywhere and "steal" maybe some sales of the bigger ones (i buy less retail games since i buy so many indie games) and some other factors as well but i think it's not as bad as it seems if we only talk about the amount of people working in the branch right now.

Zynga expanded way too quickly and went into severe contraction mode recently. They had two Austin offices that merged into one. Why the hell did they have two offices in Austin. They also had an office in McKinney, Texas that moved to Dallas and shut down their Baltimore office. I don't mind success in mobile platform but Zynga is probably worse than EA. They just copy board games and other ideas mainly. Zynga deserved the retraction because they simply grew way too fast for their own good.

The one problem I see with the new consoles is that development budgets will be increasing as well. If they don't start to scale things back a little bit and go for different art styles or something, they could really be in trouble. Oddly enough, it seems like it is only Western devs that seem to be closing. Sure Square Enix has had some big troubles lately, but almost every other Japanese company has been "just fine" in the sense that we don't hear about them closing or laying off people.

Microsoft does hire all the time, but they have also been faced with some troubles lately. Mostly due to lowered PC sales and Windows 8 not taking off like they had hoped. Depending on what their next console does (used games? always online? increased price for live?) they could either see some nice revenue, or have yet another thing that fails to meet expectations.

Sony has been restructuring a little lately, selling buildings and stock. Not the greatest thing to hear, but it is keeping them in the business which is always good. I haven't really heard of any layoffs either.

Nintendo is actually expanding quite nicely, while still consolidating to save costs. They are merging their two R&D departments into one under the same roof, without firing anyone. Retro has made a lot of hires and recently got a new building to house all of the people. Yet, people still think they are doom3d....always have, always will.