Didn't know you had one, but I subscribed to it as well!

I wonder if Nintendo is able to avoid this because the majority of their studios are all in one building. Easier to just reassign someone to another project in the building vs having all these separate studios were an employee would have to relocate for work.

Thank you! I've been streaming Elden Ring on Twitch and editing the streams down to the best bits for YouTube. As well as going over some of the bigger gaming news.

That does help and the fact their games don't cost anywhere near as much as the bigger AAA games out there. Other than maybe the 2 recent Zelda games. 

The reason why Nintendo is able to avoid this is because their attitude is entirely different. Developers are recognized as long term assets by them - software sells hardware, so you ought to have as many good games as possible - so laying developers off will hurt future profitability much more than it would help short term profitability. From all of Nintendo's Q&A sessions with their investors it's abundantly clear that Nintendo isn't a company that thinks from year to year, but in much bigger timeframes. Hence why Nintendo tends to reject or ignore the wishes of investors who are in it for the short term.

There is likely a good reason for that.

Nintendo needs to be profitable even when their core business slumps as they don't have any other markets they engage in to keep up revenue and profits to weather poor market conditions... So staying lean, stable and responsive is in their best interest.

Other companies artificially inflated employee numbers due to the COVID digital boom as everyone was stuck at home across the entire planet, now we are in a market-correction phase.

And in Microsoft's case, they are removing fat from their big purchases because some job positions don't need to be duplicated.

Games are also a matter of scale: Breath is said to be a rather expensive game, but it needed 2 million to break even. Not sure if we have a number like that for Tears, but I can't imagine it hit something like Spider-Man 2 levels (that needed 10 million): heck I remember some talk back in the day that Xenoblade X (the mecha one) was profitable on the Wii U. Never saw an official source I think, but to even claim that Nintendo didn't lose money on that....

Plus on top of it the games also stay the same price, which might annoy the hell out of some people but it certainly has its advantages. Ask Days Gone.....

Also if you look at the way Monolith Soft has managed to develop two big JRPGs, whilst remastker another one + two whole additional campaigns. 

Some might think their projects would be quite costly ambition wise, but it's clear the intensive rework of their engine and the reuse of assets helped them accomplish their goals without breaking the bank.

Don't know about the profitability of these games but Xenoblade 2 and Torna were noted to be quite profitable at the time too. I don't have doubts the successors were as well with both of them selling about 2M each.

However, the next generation will be a new challenges for them to tackle cuz it's obvious their next games might get at least a slight more expansive depending if their next games keep the same grand ambitious mindset they usually have. 

It was only 10,500 in 2023?

Didn't MS alone at one point layoff like 10,000+ people.
A good portion of that was from xbox studios?

I tried to google and the only thing I really found was :  https://publish.obsidian.md/vg-layoffs/Archive/2023

That seems to support the 10,500 number for 2023.

However I wouldn't be surprised if actual numbers where higher than these estimates.

I don't understand the Sony layoffs at all. Didn't they spend 10.2 billion in operating costs to make 608 million in profit? Isn't that a return of 6% on investment? Not bad for being in the middle of a console life cycle where you are still selling systems at a loss.

Also didn't they waste 3 billion buying Bungie and hundreds of millions more on cancelled live service games? Instead of releasing games to PC and firing devs they need to stop burning money on boondoggles like that. Who cares if you sell an extra 2 million copies of a few games on PC if 5 million people skip buying a PS5?

Also, we don't need cutting edge ray tracing graphics. Just keep the visuals ps4 levels and up the framerate.