I work in the games industry.

Other reasons include:
- having obscene management structures with tonnes of well paid middle-managers that do not contribute much and get paid more than the actual people that make the game.

- also combined with over expectations (greed) regarding projected targets and turnarounds which are almost impossible to meet.

I work in a mobile gaming company (monopolyGo) and they make staggering amounts of money every quarter. (3+/- billion per year), and STILL leadership expects more.

It's pure greed.

That combined with the growing number of idiots and non creatives that do none of the work think that magic tools/ai is the magic bullet, and so try to shift overnight into a structure that supports that .

These are the reasons.

guys the ceo just called we're gonna have to layoff half of the team because the ceo wants their second yacht

Basically companys are being greedy as usual wanting less workers while wanting workers to work 3 jobs instead of one. 🙄

one thing people dont mention with all of the layoffs are the ammount of institutional knowledge that is just going to go away.
Workflow quirks that people knew how to avoid or Internal processes that sped up production are being eroded, and that is just going to make dev cycles longer and games will be more generic and unoptimized.
Sure, some of the layed off professionals might join these outsourcing studios, but most of them are either going to quit the industry entirely, make their studios/go Indie, no matter what happens, these companies are gutting themselves and massively hampering their future potential, for very dubious reasons.

Working as an artist in the animation/VFX industry, I can confirm that a significant portion of project budgets is consumed by redundant layers of management. In my experience, dealing with five layers of supervision on top of a major client creates massive inefficiencies.
For instance, an asset might go through one supervisor who requests a change, only for the next to demand a revert, leading to completely contradictory feedback. Ultimately, the artist is blamed for exceeding the allocated bid time.
This stems from poor management and a lack of technical understanding from those in charge of hiring. When mistakes are made in recruitment, management often tries to patch the issues rather than fix them, wasting even more resources. Unfortunately, even as a senior artist, trying to constructively explain these pipeline issues often makes the situation worse

"Can you solve problems"
The problem is your portfolio doesn't show what problems you can solve, only the art you selected from what you could produce.
I've seen recruiters selecting artists for interviews based on extremely production-ready work that often was simply unrealistic. The art student had produced all that work from good mentorship/lead, but once placed in a workplace couldn't really think without thorough explanations. So i wouldn't say it's about "how well the artist can solve problems", but rather "how well can the artist navigate often chaotic and disfunctional management structures".
The artist needs to be able to wrestle out the project from the grasping claws of the managers and that takes skills that no school teaches. Best teaching method for that is probably group projects, but ironically those tend to be disliked.

While I do agree on most points you mentioned, I increasingly notice that absurd entry level skills companies demand in juniors. As someone else mentioned before: It’s not all about knowing everything from the get go, it’s about denying someone to even get the chance to be part of a process, for them to learn how production pipelines interlock. I see experienced developers leave, with them leaves their knowledge. Recruiting juniors that are almost burnt out just to “become valuable” before even worked on their first title, is devastating.

Most of the skills you mentioned in the last part of the video, is - from my understanding - the basis of concept art. It’s a job like every other job and you need a chance to learn with and from other people.

Companies know that everyone wants to create something like a video game and they capitalize on that even more now with AI being omnipresent. Call me naive, maybe. I have strong feelings about that for a really long time.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years, but the job now boils down to endless meetings with people who have no clue how to make games—yet you still have to turn on your camera and listen to their presentations featuring pretty charts made with Claude, explaining how consumers are affected by making a vehicle wheel purple instead of the yellow they decided on in last week’s meeting.

0 worker protections, outsourcing, bad management, stock buyback incentives, a culture that doesn't value "human capitol", CEOs padding their numbers for evaluations, paying CEOs tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars while they run the company into the ground and close award winning studios. We need unions for a start, and regulations going forward. So continue to practice your craft, continue to grow. But don't let these Corporations gaslight you into thinking you did something wrong. This is pure, molten exploitation. And it's long past time we started addressing it.

Of course your personal work should be better. Employers get the quality they pay for while personal works get the quality you want to produce. If employer expects your work to improve, they should also expect to pay more.

What’s really happening is that the shareholders are a bunch of smooth brains who are completely detached from reality

AI tools were supposed to reduce work for artists but in truth has only resulted in more iteration. Consistency and cleanup are a huge issues—AI cannot maintain faces, costuming, or art style across multiple images, meaning that you’re spending insane hours fixing details in Photoshop or other non-AI tools.

Many indie devs and small teams cannot find funding or investment because all the VC money has gone to AI at a time where dev costs are high as they’ve ever been, also because of AI.

I was once at a mini-conference when a few art directors from local studios were interviewed - working for Outsourceing and game companies - and they got asked about this in particular: how is junior/mid level artists going to get a spot? Since for a good while now, studios look for senior and lead positions to be filled, rarely to no lower levels are put up.
One of the art directors put it simply like this: they don't have the manpower to train a new generation and this is the case for most other studios. Sure, they could hire a junior and put a seasoned senior artist next to them to train them for their own specifications. But that would mean one less experienced artist on work and the deadlines are usually so brutal and so close, that even one senior missing partially/fully would deviate the timetable too much.

So, they can't and won't train the new generation. When asked, how then artists would get in then? Artjams, make your own teams. So basically figure it out.
There is already a huge gap between the veterans and the next generation of artists and the way the game/entertainment industry is, they don't foster growing their own team, they just want already experienced creatives, that can work on high difficulty tasks immediately. Problem is, there will be a fallout and it already shows it's signs as the veterans start to leave/get fired or age out.
Junior/mid levels have rare chance to learn and build better skills/knowledge. We are kind of cooked.

I completely agree with what you're saying.

I'm a character artist from India, and this is exactly what we're seeing. Many large AAA studios are outsourcing work to countries like India, China, Vietnam, etc., to reduce production costs.

The problem is that it creates a ripple effect:

1. Artists who already had jobs are losing them as work is moved elsewhere.
2. Even skilled artists who could have worked at those AAA studios are instead forced to work for smaller outsourcing studios with much lower pay, limiting their opportunities and career growth.

Outsourcing itself isn't the problem. The issue is when it's used primarily as a cost cutting measure at the expense of artists and stable jobs.

There are top 5% industry people who can’t find work after 6 months

If I'm expected to be that independent, I'll just make my own game, and I don't need a studio.

13:50 - I wanted to do a video about this for ages now. An artist's personal work being way better than their professional work. Often this is down to what I would refer to as an epidemic of bad art direction and micro-managing. I've seen good artists produce work that started good, and the ADs destroyed it - and all the concept artists under them agree on that.
They tweak and tweak until you as an artist give up trying. All you're doing is thinking: will they like this? how about this? what they hell will they like? vs what do I - the seasoned artist, intuitively think works best.

off shoring is a pretty heinous thing that was considered taboo until the 2008 crash. I remember when news channels use to light up companies for it. Theres enough to pay devs way more but the publishers and distributors make way too much for being middle men. The whole system is broken currently which is why indie is becoming the thing to chase

Nobody below the 'line' gets to retire, they created a system where artist have to struggle their whole careers just to end up back at square one years later.