Helldivers 2 CEO slams the games industry layoff wave, saying that bosses are making "regular devs" pay for their screw-ups

Arrowhead Games Studio CEO Shams Jorjani has criticised other games industry executives for letting rank-and-file developers take the fall for what he styles "very unsound business decisions" over the past two years.

An extremely compressed recap: tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs across companies like Embracer, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Sega and PlayStation in the past year alone, as the industry's beefiest operators struggle to meet the expectations of investors and repay debts following a period of expansion kindled by a gaming boom during the worldwide Covid pandemic lockdowns. Much-hyped, functionally bogus new technologies such as NFTs, cryptocurrency and generative AI have yet to fill the hole, so costs are being cut instead.

Arrowhead's Helldivers 2 is one of last year's big success stories, despite not having much buzz around it before launch. For all that, and despite very public difficulty keeping up with an unexpectedly large audience, Jorjani says he's not interested in significant studio expansion. "I want us to be a role model for how to do sustainable growth, because the industry today is not in a good place," he told The Game Business (HELLO DRINGO) in an interview last week.

"A lot of companies are shedding a lot of jobs. And it's not the people at the top that are losing their jobs, it's people who have moved half across the world to take jobs. And that's because of bad growth decisions made by business leaders who have taken stupid risks."

Jorjani had more vitriol to share elsewhere in the chat. "I wish that our industry hadn't shed almost... 30, 40, 50,000 jobs over the past two years," he said. "A lot of people at the top were making very unsound business decisions, and there's very little accountability on their part. Who among these executives is stepping down? Or slashing their salaries?

"What's happening is that regular developers, are paying the cost of that. That's a terrible way to run our industry. Just because you can hire and triple in size in six months, doesn't mean you should. Or that it's the best thing for the studio's long term business health.

"I'm not saying don't grow, but do it in a way where you don't have to then let go of one third of the company because you made stupid decisions. I'm not going to hire a hundred people. I would like to do that and help people in the industry, but my first priority is to make sure that people have jobs for many years."

I've written up a bunch of stories about industry layoffs, rich with rhetoric about not taking decisions "lightly" and "aligning" for success. It's rare that the executives quoted in those announcements fall on their swords, or even lightly graze themselves with their swords in the form of some reduced annual compensation. The only caveat I will offer is that executive pay structures can be rather byzantine: many are paid partly in stock. As XenoFour points out below, this also means that their incomes are tethered to the overall financial performance of the company rather than whether they can keep individual developers employed.