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Discord is laying off 17 percent of its staff, a move that CEO Jason Citron said is meant to “sharpen our focus and improve the way we work together to bring more agility to our organization.”

The cuts were announced today to employees in an all-hands meeting and internal memo I’ve obtained. They’ll impact 170 people across various departments. 

Turns out Google’s postpandemic reckoning didn’t just hit the Google Hardware team responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit products — it’s taken similarly sized bites out of Google’s core engineering and Google Assistant teams too. Google just confirmed to The Verge that it’s eliminated “a few hundred” roles in each of these divisions, meaning Google has confirmed layoffs of around a thousand employees on Wednesday alone, if we use a reasonable definition of “few.”

And those are only the cuts we know about. We asked Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini to say if this was the complete and total number of job cuts in this round of layoffs, but she stopped replying at that point, only confirming existing layoff reports at 9to5Google and Semafor. The New York Times reported on the engineering team layoffs too.

Google’s hardware division just took a body blow. The company has confirmed it’s laying off hundreds of hardware workers, especially in its augmented reality division — and 9to5Google is reporting that Fitbit co-founders James Park, Eric Friedman, and other Fitbit leaders are leaving the company entirely.

Update, 1:42AM ET: It’s not just Fitbit and AR. Around a thousand Google layoffs were just confirmed, and there may be more.

Twitch is laying off more than 500 employees, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced this morning, reportedly accounting for around 35 percent of its staff. Bloomberg first reported that the video game streaming platform was planning layoffs on Tuesday, and the company confirmed today that the cuts were happening.

“I regret having to share that we are taking the painful step to reduce our headcount by just over 500 people across Twitch,” Clancy wrote. “This will be a very hard day.”

Humane laid off 4 percent of employees this week in a move that was described as a cost cutting measure to those who were impacted, according to sources familiar with the matter. Employees were recently told by leadership that budgets would be lowered this year, said one of the people, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission.

The cuts, which numbered 10 people, come ahead of the five-year-old startup shipping its first device: a $699, screenless, AI-powered pin that is pitched as a smartphone replacement. After a lot of hype and secrecy, Humane unveiled the AI Pin to the world in November and began accepting preorders, with shipments planned to begin in March.

Unity is undergoing yet another layoff, and this time it’s going to affect about 25 percent of its entire workforce, or around 1,800 employees. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company, which makes the popular game engine Unity, said it’s making the cuts “as it restructures and refocuses on its core business, and to position itself for long-term and profitable growth.”

Unity has been through several rounds of layoffs within the past year, with the most recent one affecting 265 workers last November. However, it’s still not clear whether Unity is cutting 1,800 additional workers on top of the layoffs it announced last year. We’ve reached out to Unity for clarification.

Layoffs are an unfortunate reality of any industry, but the scope and scale of video game layoffs in 2023 are far beyond a typical year. More than any specific video game or piece of news, layoffs defined the past 12 months. Companies large and small have felt their impact. Unofficial figures estimate 9,000 workers have been affected, and at the heart of it all are corporations that valued growth at all costs — including people.

In September, Epic Games laid off 830 employees. In a statement, CEO Tim Sweeney wrote, “We’ve been spending way more money than we earn. […] I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.” Some of that spending was on companies like SuperAwesome and Bandcamp which Epic bought in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Both companies were sold off shortly after Epic announced layoffs. 

In its Q3 earnings report published Thursday, game development software company Unity announced that it will “likely” be implementing layoffs as part of broader cost saving measures.

In the report, the company says it is assessing its product portfolio “to focus on those products that are most valuable to our customers” and is “evaluating the right cost structure that aligns with the more focused portfolio.” It plans to make changes during the fourth quarter, and they will “likely include discontinuing certain product offerings, reducing our workforce, and reducing our office footprint.” The company expects to complete its changes before the end of Q1 2024.

Ubisoft, the game publisher behind franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, is laying off 124 employees at its visual effects studio and on its global IT team.

Hybride — the name of Ubisoft’s Montreal-based visual effects studio — has worked on several big-name projects, including Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Beau Is Afraid, and more. Of the 124 impacted workers, Ubisoft spokesperson Antoine Leduc-Labelle says 98 people are based in Canada, making up less than 2 percent of the company’s workforce in the country. (Ubisoft has studios in Montreal, Quebec City, Chicoutimi, Toronto, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Sherbrooke.) Leduc-Labelle adds that this doesn’t affect Ubisoft’s production teams.

This week, Shailesh Prakash, the VP in charge of Google News, gathered his hundreds of employees to talk about a surprise round of layoffs that had just hit the team. 

A year ago, cuts like this at Google — historically the most coddling employer in all of Big Tech — would have been unthinkable. But market forces have a way of catching up with everyone. In January, the search giant conducted its first mass layoff in over a decade, cutting 6 percent of its staff, or about 12,000 people. Last month, hundreds of recruiters were let go, a concrete sign that hiring targets have been reduced significantly. 

LinkedIn is laying off about 668 employees across various teams, the Microsoft-owned company announced on Monday.

It’s the second time LinkedIn has announced cuts this year; it laid off 716 employees in May, saying at the time that the move was meant to “re-organize for greater agility and growth.” This time, the cuts are about “streamlining our decision making,” according to LinkedIn’s statement. Microsoft has also announced multiple rounds of layoffs recently, including 10,000 positions it eliminated at the start of this year.

Naughty Dog is reportedly cutting some of its contracted staff. According to a Kotaku report, the Sony-owned studio is not renewing the contracts of around 25 temporary workers across numerous departments, with quality assurance staff primarily affected. Full-time staff were apparently not impacted.

Naughty Dog is one of the jewels in Sony’s first-party crown, developing platform-exclusive hits like The Last of Us and the Uncharted series. Back in January, a live-action interpretation of The Last of Us debuted on HBO to critical and social acclaim, but apparently, that popularity has not been enough to support continued development on its Last of Us multiplayer project.