Veterans from Warner Bros and 2K explain why the low pay and uncertainty of the indie space beats "doomscrolling on LinkedIn"

Justin Fischer and Brock Feldman suddenly found themselves out of a job in 2025, when Warner Bros decided to shutter their studio, Player First Games, the developer of Multiversus.

The free-to-play fighting game, which featured various Warner Bros characters, had launched in beta in 2022 before going offline around a year later, in preparation for the full launch in May 2024. Warner acquired Player First just after that 1.0 launch – then announced the studio's closure seven months later, after pulling the plug on Multiversus.

Fischer says that there's no secret around why the game shut down. "It's just user acquisition costs are hard for everybody," he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "Free-to-play has been taking a beating, and it wasn't just Multiversus… The economy of the industry is changing, and it's hard out there for everybody."

The story is a depressingly familiar one. It's estimated that there have been more than 58,000 layoffs in the games industry since 2022, with the majority occurring in North America. The AAA sector has been particularly hard hit. "I think this is as bad as the '83 crash if you're a game developer based in North America or western Europe, in a traditional AAA studio," said 1UP Ventures' Amir Satvat in a recent feature in Edge magazine. "That is ground zero for destruction."

biz has spoken to developers who have made the leap from AAA to indie in recent years to find out their experiences.

Source link