The Sector's Layoffs Since 2023: A Dated Record of Named Studios and Public Announcements
A chronological record of publicly announced layoffs at named MMO and live-service studios since January 2023, citing the company announcement or press coverage for each, with headcounts where disclosed. Structured as a factual log, not analysis.
Live-service staffing is the cost line that moves first when a quarter disappoints.
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The live-service industry's cost-cutting wave produced a string of public announcements beginning in early 2023. This is a named, dated log of disclosed reductions at studios with direct MMO or live-service exposure — headcounts where the company or credible press coverage stated them.
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The 2023 Announcements
The wave opened in January 2023 when Microsoft confirmed approximately 10,000 roles cut across the company, a figure that included staff at its gaming division. The same month, Amazon confirmed layoffs across Amazon Games and the broader AWS organisation; the scale touching Amazon Games specifically was not separately itemised in public filings. These were the headline numbers, but smaller studios followed through the year.
Chronology
- January 2023Microsoft gaming division, ~10,000 (company-wide figure)
- January 2024Riot Games, ~530 employees (~11% of workforce)
- October 2023Bungie, ~100 employees (~8% of workforce)
- Late 2023Jagex, undisclosed headcount reduction
- January 2024Microsoft-Blizzard gaming division, ~1,900 (Blizzard share not broken out)
- 2024Square Enix, project cancellations and restructuring (no single redundancy total)
- February 2024Amazon Games, undisclosed; several dozen reported
- July 2024Sony/Bungie, ~220 employees (~17% of Bungie workforce); separate from the ~900 PlayStation Studios cuts announced in February 2024
In January 2024, Riot Games — publisher of the MMO-adjacent live-service titles League of Legends and Valorant, and at the time developing a full MMO set in Runeterra — announced it was cutting approximately 530 employees, roughly 11 percent of its global workforce. The company framed the reduction around a recalibration of project scope. The Runeterra MMO, which had been in pre-production, was among the projects cited as under review.
Bungie, the Destiny 2 developer acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2022, disclosed in October 2023 that it was laying off approximately 100 employees ↗, around 8 percent of staff at that time, citing revenue shortfalls on Destiny 2's Lightfall expansion.
Sharding, megaservers and regional clusters are a cost decision before they are a design one.
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NCSoft, whose catalogue includes Lineage, Blade & Soul and Guild Wars 2 via ArenaNet, reported declining revenue across several quarters of 2023 in its public filings to the Korea Exchange. The Seoul-based publisher did not announce a single headcount event in the Western press during this period, but subsidiary restructuring at NCSOFT West — its San Francisco–area operation — was reported by trade press in the latter part of the year, with the scale not officially quantified.
2024: The Second Round
The pace accelerated in early 2024. In January, Microsoft-Blizzard confirmed an additional approximately 1,900 roles cut within its gaming division following the completion of the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Blizzard Entertainment was explicitly named among the affected units, though the Blizzard-specific headcount within that total was not broken out in the public announcement.
Square Enix, developer and publisher of Final Fantasy XIV — which passed 30 million registered accounts in 2023 — announced in 2024 that it was taking an impairment charge on cancelled projects as part of a wider restructuring, having already sold several Western studios to Embracer Group in 2022. The company did not publish a combined redundancy figure at that time, and the earlier studio sales had already moved staff outside Square Enix's direct employment.
Amazon Games made a further reduction in February 2024, confirming it was cutting several dozen roles and winding down development on at least one unannounced project. The announcement was made via a reported internal memo ↗ and covered in trade press; the precise headcount figure was not officially disclosed.
In February 2024, Sony Interactive Entertainment announced approximately 900 roles cut across PlayStation Studios globally, and in July 2024 a separate Bungie reduction followed, affecting around 220 employees, representing approximately 17 percent of Bungie's remaining workforce. The announcement was made by Sony and confirmed by Bungie publicly.
Pearl Abyss, the Seoul-based developer behind Black Desert Online, reported in its 2024 quarterly filings a reduction in headcount year-on-year without a single announcement event, consistent with the attrition-based restructuring common in Korean publicly listed studios rather than the discrete layoff announcements typical of Western publishers.
Digital Extremes, developer of Warframe and based in London, Ontario, was acquired by Chinese conglomerate Tencent in stages; no material layoff announcement from the studio appeared in the public record through mid-2024.
Jagex, the Cambridge-based developer of RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, announced in late 2023 that it was reducing its workforce as part of an operational review following a protracted ownership process. The company did not publish a specific headcount figure in its public statement.
The pattern across these announcements is consistent: the largest disclosed cuts are attached to the largest publicly traded companies or their subsidiaries, where securities filings and investor communications force disclosure. Privately held studios — Intrepid Studios among them — produced no equivalent announcements during this period.