Layoffs have been a constant drumbeat in gaming industry news since 2022. Even if the cadence of layoffs seems to have slowed in 2026, the severity of those cuts has not lessened. In July, Microsoft made 1600 staff redundant as part of its great reset, and promised investors they would let 1600 more staff go in the next 12 months.
Cuts like those and the ongoing economic pressures plaguing the industry – rising debt rates, a cost of living crisis, and a memory shortage that is making every aspect of making and playing video games pricier – should have the head of any large studio examining their plans for the future. Especially when games are taking longer to make, costing more to make, and up against a much greater volume of competition than even two years ago.
With all that in mind, when I wasn’t talking to Saber Interactive’s chief creative officer Tim Willits about generative AI, I wanted to know what he would do if he ran one of those 200-people big-budget game studios. Because say what you like about Saber (and there’s a lot of things people like to say about Saber), but the developer is doing well at a time when a lot of other studios and publishers are struggling.
“The number one mistake that traditional legacy developers do is that they have two hundred employees in Texas, California, New York, whatever,” Willits says. “Each one of those developers is expensive. You have 200 people that you’re paying $15,000 per person per month, which gets you way over two million. They’re all working on a game and you do not need 200 people before you have a vertical slice, so you’re burning money.”
It’s great when a game enters full production, Willits says – “You have 200 of the most highly skilled, amazing people ever and you make an amazing game” – but when that game ships, the studio has to “Get those 200 super highly trained people onto massive production immediately.” They’re back to spending millions of dollars a month while they’re still years away from a full release.
We’ve seen a growing number of studios let go of their teams either just before release (a la Star Wars: Zero Company) or immediately following launch (like with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced). This tactic means no talent is retained, and a studio is starting largely from scratch with each new project, bringing with it little institutional knowledge.
While I would like to think that I’m breaking new ground with this conclusion, unfortunately, Gamesindustry.biz exists, and the costs and practices of running a large studio are well documented. What I was interested in, though, was Willits advice on what those 200 people should be put on next. “If you are a studio that has made mega hits, but it takes you five years to make a mega hit, it is totally okay if you do some work for hire,” he says. “It doesn’t make your mega hit AAA game any worse. If you have five or six things that help keep the lights on, it’s totally okay. I would love to see one of these super studios do some fun side projects. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Willits points to the early years of Saber Interactive, where the founders “had to hustle and take work from anywhere”. Even today, as well as working on big licensed titles like Space Marine 2, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando, and Turok, as well as a set of original games such as the Snowrunner series, Saber continues to take on remaster work. They have a team updating the original Hitman right now. “Our remasters are very reliable,” Willits says. “We get paid, IOI makes money.”
And, when it comes to original work, Saber keep them small for a long time. “We have teams around the world,” Willits says. “We have multiple games that we start at all these studios, even with a team of five folks. We don’t put an entire team in a project until after the vertical slice.”
When they’re ready to expand a project, Saber often bring in a partner that can “either co-invest or co-fund or work for hire.” Road Kings, for instance, an upcoming American Truck Simulator-style haulage sim is being published by Focus Interactive. “You need to spread yourself out,” Willits says. “Have reliable income.”
Bringing it back to the 200-person studio, Willits says “There’s a number of games on Steam that are super fun, that are literally five bucks. They’re made with ten guys. Do that. Why can’t a mega studio from Santa Monica make six of those? One could be a hit.”
I ask Willits if there would be any scale of game Saber would consider too small. “No,” he says without hesitating. “Look at Snowrunner. Spintires is one guy. Literally one guy. We built a franchise around one guy’s idea. I truly believe that if you look at some of the people that have lost their jobs in big studios in America, because I know a lot of them personally – I hired some of them – if you were to take all those people and say, ‘Okay, you guys are in charge of making five games that cost $5 and you gotta get it done in three months, one or two of those games would be hits.”
I will say, we’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of press releases about co-op games chasing the coattails of Peak, many made by devs laid off by large studios. While there’s no reason these games shouldn’t take off, they’ve not been obviously better because of their makers’ CVs. But I would like to see what that scale of game looked like when made within a big studio. The closest we come to those sorts of small scale projects at a large studio are the Double Fine Amnesia Fortnight dev jams.
Of course, there was Hi-Fi Rush and we know how that went.
There is another path for laid off developers, Willits says, ones who want to continue working on big projects. “You get your creative director, your animation guy, your programmers,” he says. “They have the knowledge and experience and the talent. Come up with some ideas, and then look around the world, find other studios, and I’m not talking about outsourcing, I’m talking about buying in a development team somewhere in the world. South America is huge now and the same time zone. Really work together.'”
When James travelled out to Gamescom Latam earlier this year, he spoke with teams of developers who were tired of being seen purely as outsourcing talent. However, co-development or operating as a split team may actually see developers engage with the region. “Traditional North American and even British publishers are afraid of certain parts of the world. They’re afraid of South America. They’re like ‘We don’t speak Spanish or Portuguese’. Get over that and stop that fear.”
For a company with such an outspoken CEO, Saber does operate with surprisingly little ego. They work anywhere, with anyone, and at any scale of project. While there are a lot of studios that get their start working as an outsourced team, or remasters that keep the lights on, once they reach a certain size many leave that work behind. I can think of five without trying and that list would stretch out quickly if I put some thought to it.
This isn’t to say a studio is wrong for focusing on its own work – and it will always be impossible to know how many layoffs could have been averted – but an industry with studios that prop themselves up with work-for-hire or small projects while they get the next big thing spooled up could be more secure.
Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.
