Amir Satvat: Japanese game studios have an estimated 97%+ staff retention

According to Satvat, that stability is tied to lower executive pay and the fact that Japanese studios have been less swept up in the live-service craze.

Satvat also estimates that the game industry will lose around 14,500 jobs in 2026, while 18,000 to 25,000 new game jobs are added each year.

What happened

Kotaku cites Amir Satvat, former Business Development Director at Tencent and the person behind ASGC’s Games Industry Layoffs Tracker, on the state of the games job market. In the piece, he says Japanese studios are notably good at keeping staff, with retention of roughly 97% or higher at companies including Capcom, Konami and Nintendo. The article presents that as a broad observation about Japanese studios, but Kotaku does not fully break down the underlying dataset or calculation method.

Satvat links that high stability to two factors: Japanese studios reportedly pay executives less and have been less involved in the global shift toward live-service games. The article presents that as his explanation; the underlying data and methodology are not fully laid out. As a result, it remains unclear how much of the cited retention is driven by compensation structures, product strategy, or other business factors.

The same source also cites broader industry figures from Satvat. He estimates that a total of 14,500 videogame workers will lose their jobs in 2026, while around 18,000 to 25,000 new jobs in games are created each year. That suggests the sector is still generating new roles, even as layoffs remain significant in absolute terms.

Kotaku also points to 1,600 Xbox jobs lost in July 2026 and another 1,600 expected within a year. Those figures are used in the article as an example of the wider restructuring across the industry, alongside the more stable position Satvat says Japanese publishers appear to have.

Background

Satvat is presented in the article as someone who has tracked the industry’s layoff wave through ASGC’s Games Industry Layoffs Tracker since 2022. His comments fit into a broader debate about the impact of the live-service focus and ongoing restructuring at major publishers and platform holders. Kotaku uses his tracker and estimates to frame the current games job market as one where layoffs, reassignments and new hiring are all happening at once.

The comparison with Japanese studios is a key part of the piece. Capcom, Konami and Nintendo are cited as examples of companies that, according to Satvat, show unusually high staff retention. The article suggests that Japanese publishers have been less affected by the international wave of restructuring than many Western companies, although the exact scope of that comparison is not made fully clear.

Kotaku also quotes Tim Sweeney, who previously warned that the industry is heading toward the biggest videogame crash or disruption yet. That reference places Satvat’s comments in a wider context of concern about the sector, where major layoffs, changing business models and uncertainty about growth all sit side by side.

The cited figures of 14,500 expected layoffs in 2026 and 18,000 to 25,000 new jobs per year show that Satvat does not describe the market as shrinking outright, but as a sector where job losses and replacements are happening at the same time. The article does not explain which regions, job categories or studios are included in those estimates, so the numbers are presented mainly as directional.

Sources

• Kotaku: report on Japanese studios, staff retention and Amir Satvat.
• Kotaku: reference to earlier comments by Tim Sweeney about a possible major crash or disruption in the games industry.