The Big Picture: What you need to know about the ongoing games industry reset

The Big Picture: What you need to know about the ongoing games industry reset Amir Satvat's talk at Gamescom Dev laid bare the reasons behind the catastrophic layoffs – and what needs to be done The games industry is undergoing a reset. Back in December, Satvat told GamesIndustry.biz that he expected around 7,500 redundancies across the industry in 2026, down from the roughly 9,200 in 2025. "And now because more and more people in China are going to college, each year we can comfortably expect 10 million plus people who are going to have computers." On the one hand, he said, the Chinese market offers a market opportunity for developers outside China, because the "taste for games in China [is] not that different from the taste [in] other places." But on the other hand, Chinese developers will provide more competition globally, "because God, when you go over there and you see the volume and the number of studios… And I think in most cases, we have all underestimated how transformative and impactful that's going to be over the next few years." Growth and contraction In terms of where growth opportunities lay, Satvat pointed towards large user-generated content (UGC) platforms like Roblox and UEFN, but also sounded a note of caution that the "revenue opportunities on those platforms [are] concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people." Competition is getting ever tougher: the number of new Steam releases reached around 12,000 in H1 2026, up 19% year on year. Satvat pointed to the collapse in global games start-up funding from $9.9 billion in 2021 to just $2 billion in 2023, and a similar drop in private equity and venture capital funding from $12.1 billion to $2.7 billion.