Sources: Unity Laying Off Hundreds of Staffers
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Wonder if this was accurate or if we are starting to see the onset of a recession and companies are trying to shore up their financials (at the cost of their employees livelihoods).
Gaming is mostly unprofitable given the excessive 30% commissions charged by Valve, Apple, Google, Sony, Microsoft. Only platform owners make consistent profits.
Most gaming companies may be unprofitable for the same reason most restaurants end up shuttering quickly; it's a hard thing to make a successful business in a saturated market.
But it's certainly not bexause of the fees that Valve, Apple, Google, etc. charge. Those have been there for over a decade and if you're running or starting a game company now, you would factor those into your business plan just like payroll and taxes.
The fees are pretty high but the free distribution and in the case of Google and Apple, free development kits and usable SDKs have to get paid for somehow. Those things have been subsidized by the platform fees for so long now we have a generation who seem to think they should/have/always will be free. But just two decades ago they weren't. And getting distribution and eyeballs for your indie game was much, much, much more of a barrier and distributors/publishers took more than 30%.