Things are not great in the videogame industry right now. It seems like no matter what you do—make a hit, make a flop, don’t make anything at all—there’s a good likelihood that you’re going to end up out of work. For people who’ve been around long enough, it brings back memories of the game industry crash of the early 1980s, when the fledgling business suffered a massive contraction driven by oversaturation, external competition, and executive mismanagement. But industry veterans Brenda and John Romero, who were there for that very rough patch, told GamesIndustry that the current situation seems even worse.
“I feel like the industry’s in a really horrible place,” Brenda Romero said. “I mean, we were there in the ’80s for the crash, and this is definitely crashier. There are so few people that have not been affected, or their partner’s affected, or they’re worried about being affected. It’s a really difficult time right now.”
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Where all of this is headed, and how it will be resolved, the Romeros—like the rest of us—do not know: John noted that Battlefield 6 was one of the biggest games of 2025, and Electronic Arts imposed sweeping layoffs among its development teams anyway. “I don’t understand what that’s all about,” he said.
“This is really one of those times where I don’t know,” Brenda said. “And you hear behind the scenes, there’s tremendous push toward teams using generative AI, there’s tremendous pushback from teams and from gamers about using generative AI… And before you ask, we’re not using generative AI. So I don’t know.
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