In recent years, January has been a troubled month for the video games industry. While publishers on the early side of earnings season typically get to boast holiday sales, they also tend to announce heavy layoffs around this time, and 2026 is no exception.
Israeli mobile games company Playtika led January with 500 job cuts — 15% of its workforce — citing a desire to utilize more AI-dependent resources and rely less on sheer headcount.
Per a survey in GDC’s 2026 State of the Game Industry report, 28% of respondents said they lost a job over the last two years, with one in three U.S. developers experiencing a layoff and 36% of the collective industry reporting AI usage in their work.
Though 2025’s more-than-5K job losses were far less severe than years prior, the first month of 2026 finished at just under 900.
More threatening is the degree of consolidation and business shifts the biggest publishers are staring down, amid an overall thin calendar for major releases.
After this May, the gaming calendar is barren until Rockstar’s much-delayed Grand Theft Auto 6, for which continual pushbacks continue to cause unease and misinformation that occasionally disrupt parent Take-Two Interactive’s stock.
Electronic Arts, sharing Take-Two’s status as the biggest standalone Western publisher, is set to be sold to a consortium of buyers led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which already presides over Savvy Games Group, the parent organization of mobile games giant Scopely.
Though its successful EA Sports brand aligns well with the Kingdom’s sporting and live entertainment interests, the $55 billion deal doesn’t bode well for the rest of its decades-long AAA business, and members of the U.S. Congress noted their concern in a letter to the FTC in January. The publisher currently has no big games scheduled.
French publisher Ubisoft is similarly absent from 2026’s major games slate, having announced a second restructuring in the span of a year that will see hundreds more cuts as several of its unions call for an international four-day strike later in February.
An anticipated remake of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is among the casualties of its reorg, while another remake for Splinter Cell remains undated, with no clear release window, putting pressure on core franchises such as Assassin’s Creed to stay the course.
As for Warner Bros., its scaled-back gaming division is part of Netflix’s pending deal to acquire the entire studio and HBO, with just one Lego Batman game slated for 2026 as a sequel to Hogwarts Legacy takes its time to coalesce.
Sony’s PlayStation is far and away the winner of the console wars, with nearly every new Xbox title and a remake of Halo set for PS5 releases. Still, Sony has largely dialed back what was once an ambitious push into live services, the last of which, March’s Marathon, has to make the most of Sony’s 2022 Bungie acquisition.
That $3.7 billion deal has proven more fateful than fruitful after a scaling down of online game Destiny 2’s teams and expansions alongside a difficult development cycle for Marathon, which was initially set for September 2025. Still, Sony has its annual MLB The Show offering ahead and Saros, its next flashy first-party title, on the docket.
As for Xbox, Microsoft Gaming’s ecosystem — consisting of its namesake console brand, Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard and Fallout parent Bethesda — is still adapting to the tighter expectations of its parent. Microsoft’s More Personal Computing segment, which houses its gaming division, was its only unit to post a revenue decline in recent earnings.
Then there’s Capcom. The Japanese publisher’s command of Resident Evil is seemingly unstoppable, having stuck to a consistent schedule of new mainline games and remakes in the horror franchise since rebooting it from scratch in 2017. In January, Capcom posted its largest single-day gain of shares in 18 months, well ahead of the series’ next big release, Requiem, at the end of February.
A sign of the confidence in Resident Evil is yet another film adaptation of the franchise, set to hit theaters in September through Sony and this time with Weapons director Zach Cregger.
Likewise, Nintendo will maintain its gaming clout on the Hollywood side with April’s Super Mario Galaxy film, the sequel to 2023’s billion-dollar Mario grosser. With the console giant itself lacking in major scheduled releases in 2026, it has adapted well to utilizing other forms of media to bridge the gap between its biggest games, with a live-action Zelda film following in 2027.
Such an uncertain year ahead for some of the most prominent entities in gaming could ultimately give way to a hit year for gaming’s Japanese veterans.
