2024 was a brutal year for the video game industry, with thousands of jobs lost due to massive layoffs. So far, that trend has continued in 2025 with recent layoffs at Eidos Montreal and Striking Distance Studios. Now, Shams Jorjani–the CEO of Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios–is speaking out about the mass layoffs and calling for accountability from the CEOs who make those decisions.
“I wish that our industry hadn’t shed almost… 30, 40, 50,000 jobs over the past two years,” said Jorjani during an interview with The Game Business. “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.”
Jorjani went on to explain that he isn’t against seeing studios expand, but he argues that growth should be responsibly paced for the long-term health of the business and the employees who work there. He added that his “first priority is to make sure that people [at Arrowhead] have jobs for many years.” During the same interview, Jorjani noted that the turnaround of Helldivers 2 was inspired by No Man’s Sky’s comeback story.
Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt recently made similar remarks about layoffs and suggested that the video game industry would be in a more sustainable place if companies were making several different types of games rather than a constant cycle of new battle-royale titles.