Game industry layoffs keep rolling through March 2026
March 2026 has brought another wave of job cuts across the game industry. Ubisoft gutted a studio co-founded by Tom Clancy, nDreams shuttered two VR studios, and EA trimmed the teams behind Battlefield 6 just months after a record-breaking launch. Meanwhile, a GDC survey paints a bleak picture of how widespread the damage has become.
Ubisoft Red Storm: 105 jobs gone
Ubisoft laid off 105 employees at Red Storm Entertainment, the North Carolina studio Tom Clancy co-founded 30 years ago. The studio has stopped all game development. About 70 staff remain to handle IT support and maintenance work on the Snowdrop engine.
The cuts are part of Ubisoft's broader restructuring into five "creative houses" organized by genre. The company's stock has lost over 80% of its value since 2021, and it announced plans to cut a total of 400 employees in 2026 across multiple rounds of layoffs. Studios in Leamington, Osaka, and Saint-Antoine were already closed in 2025.
Ubisoft's ongoing crisis explained
nDreams: 78 roles at risk
UK-based VR specialist nDreams put 78 employees at risk of redundancy on March 5. The company closed its Brighton-based Near Light and Compass studios entirely. The restructured company will focus on its Elevation studio with roughly 120 staff working on unannounced projects, plus a small XR R&D group.
CEO Tim Gillo pointed to "undeniable commercial challenges" in the VR games market. Compass had only been established in February 2025, making it barely a year old at the time of closure.
EA: Battlefield studios cut despite record launch
Electronic Arts cut staff across Criterion, DICE, Ripple Effect, and Motive, the four studios collectively working on Battlefield 6. EA called it a "realignment." The irony is hard to miss. Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game in the US in 2025 and moved roughly 7 million copies at launch in October.
But the game hasn't held its audience. Steam concurrent players dropped from a peak of 747,700 to around 67,000 by the time of the cuts. Player complaints about monetization, balance issues, and slow content updates appear to have caught up with the franchise.
IGN covers the Battlefield studio layoffs
The GDC survey numbers
The 2026 State of the Game Industry report surveyed over 2,300 professionals and the results are stark. 28% of respondents experienced a layoff in the past two years. That number rises to 33% for US-based developers. Game designers were hit hardest at a 20% layoff rate.
Of those laid off, 48% haven't found new work. AAA studio employees were disproportionately affected, with two-thirds reporting layoffs compared to one-third at indie studios. 74% of surveyed students expressed concern about their future job prospects.
On unionization, 82% of US respondents support it. Support ran highest among workers earning under $200,000 (87%), those who'd been laid off (88%), and those under 45 (86%). Not a single respondent aged 18-24 opposed unionization.