Why team size is the first thing to check when choosing a game studio

Where you worked mattered more than how good you were

Follow the explanation of the man who tracks the industry's layoffs, and what decided whether a game developer kept a job in 2026 was less individual skill than which studio they worked at. Amir Satvat has run the ASGC Games Industry Layoffs Tracker since 2022. By its count, the games industry lost 57,628 jobs between 2022 and 2026, and 96% of the jobs lost in 2026 were in North America and Europe. Speaking to Edge, Satvat said that for a developer at a traditional triple-A studio in North America or western Europe, this is as bad as the 1983 crash.

In the same interview he treated Japan as a separate case. Nintendo, Konami and Capcom, he said, all retain 97% of their staff or more. The reasons he gave had nothing to do with the ability of individual developers. They were structural choices a company makes: team size, executive pay and the order in which people are cut. Those are also the three places an applicant can look when choosing where to work.

Team size and live-service exposure can be read before you apply

Japanese teams, Satvat said, tend to be much smaller and leaner. They were not swept up in the live-service trend or in mega-blockbusters built by 500-person teams. His advice to Western studios was the same: keep teams small, and focus on what you do well rather than chasing trends. Eurogamer connected this structure to how Capcom, Nintendo and Koei Tecmo have done this year, and Koei Tecmo has said it counts on smaller titles to keep growing. Eurogamer stopped short of calling the link proven.

Seen from the applicant's side, this changes the order in which a job listing is read. Before the title, look at the size of the project you would join. Is it a structure where hundreds of people work on one game, or a game built to follow the live-service trend? According to the tracker, layoffs were concentrated in exactly those places, the traditional triple-A studios of North America and western Europe. At one point Satvat estimated that for 12 to 18 months more than half of all layoffs worldwide were in California.

Executive pay and the order of cuts belong on the checklist too

The other difference Satvat pointed to was executive pay. Japanese executives still make good money, he said, but it is two or three million dollars, not 30 million. Eurogamer placed two Western figures beside that: the $38.6 million EA chief Andrew Wilson received last year and the $42.1 million Take-Two's Strauss Zelnick earned in 2022. Both companies laid off staff this year.

The order of cuts differs as well. When a Japanese studio has to reduce labour costs, the first people affected are contractors based outside the country. Satvat described this as a practice meant to protect core staff in Japan, and added that Japan is not a utopia. Layoffs happen there too, but they fall on different people. So an applicant should look at the shape of the role as closely as the name of the company. Core staff in Japan and overseas contractors can work for the same company and still sit at very different places in the queue when cuts come.

One interview is the source, so some numbers still need checking

Everything above rests on a single Edge interview with Satvat. We could not read the original, and this page is based on the passages reported by Eurogamer and GamesRadar. The year used for the executive pay comparison and the scale of annual layoffs inside Japan still need to be checked against the original. We also could not confirm from the tracker's own data whether the 96% counts layoff events or affected workers.

For an applicant, the most important gap is the 97% retention figure itself. It is not yet clear how or over what period it was measured, or whether it applies equally to new graduates and experienced hires, to developers and to other roles.