I've spent 30 years so far in entertainment — games, film, streaming, books, music, anime, all of it — and, just like everyone else, I've been watching all these horrendous layoffs and disastrous acquisitions and consolidations. Students frequently ask for my opinion on this, but I have never taken the time to organize my thoughts. But the recent Epic Games layoffs and the human cost really shook me. So let me just say it plainly: the people who built the things you love are being systematically removed from the businesses that now own those things. And the businesses doing it genuinely don't understand what they're losing.
When investors and analysts talk about IP value, they're talking about brand recognition. The logo. The character. The title that makes a consumer's eyes light up with instant familiarity. And look, that has real value, I'm not disputing that. You can build campaigns on it, greenlight sequels, and command premium pricing. All true.
But the recognition isn't the asset. The fandom that built the recognition is.
The Recognition Isn't the Asset
There's a fundamental difference between an audience that knows what something is and a fandom that would genuinely grieve if it disappeared. One of those is a metric. The other is a living ecosystem built over years — sometimes decades — by people who were paying close attention to other people. Who were listening. Who were creating spaces for communities to gather, facilitating exchanges between fans that the brand didn't script and couldn't control, and showing up when the relationship needed tending. The brand recognition is just the visible surface of all that invisible labor. It's the scar tissue of thousands of small decisions made by humans who understood the audience because they were in an actual relationship with it.
When a holding company acquires an IP and immediately asks how to extract more value faster, they are — without quite realizing it — treating the scar tissue as the wound. The recognition as the relationship. And so the playbook writes itself: reduce headcount, consolidate, replace community teams with automated content calendars, optimize output. Stop listening because listening doesn't show up in a quarterly report. Stop creating new spaces because new spaces are a cost center. And let go of the people who built the original ecosystem, because those people are expensive and the spreadsheet doesn't have a column for "a recognizable name or face representing the institutional memory of why anyone cares about this."
The scale of what's happening is hard to overstate. In 2023, more than 10,000 people were laid off across the games industry alone. 2024 was worse — at least 15,048 people lost their jobs. A GDC survey found one third of US games industry workers were laid off in the last two years. But the numbers are the easy part to report. What they don't capture is who specifically is leaving — and what walks out the door with them.
The Invisible People
It's not the people who made the spreadsheets look good. It's the community managers who spent years learning the specific language, rituals, and emotional registers of a particular fandom. The narrative designers who understood why a character meant something beyond their function in a story. The brand storytellers who could read the temperature of a community before it became a crisis. The developers embedded in the relationship between a franchise and its players long enough to carry institutional knowledge that can't be documented — only accumulated through time and genuine engagement. And here's the cruel irony: these are also the people who historically have the hardest time getting promoted, because their value is almost impossible to reduce to a number. You can't put a dollar figure on "prevented a community from turning toxic before it went public" or "kept a fanbase emotionally invested through a two-year gap between releases." The contribution is real — sometimes it's the difference between a franchise that survives a stumble and one that doesn't — but it doesn't show up cleanly on a performance review. So in good times they're underleveraged, passed over for people whose wins are easier to measure. And in bad times, when someone has to justify every headcount to a board, they're the first ones cut. The same invisibility that limited their careers also made them expendable. PC Gamer described what sits inside each statistic as scores of intimate miniature apocalypses — someone's livelihood, maybe their dream job or first break in this competitive industry, dashed against the wall. That's exactly what it is.
The Extraction Playbook
Warner Bros. Discovery is the case study nobody should be able to look away from. After the 2022 merger, the new leadership arrived with a mandate to extract value from one of the most culturally significant IP libraries ever assembled — DC, HBO, Looney Tunes, Warner Bros. Pictures, CNN — while paying down the debt load the deal created. Remember, we are talking about one of the greatest collections of sentimental value ever assembled by humankind, from Casablanca to The Exorcist, to Bugs Bunny and Batman, over the labors of more than 100 years. What followed was the most naked demonstration of extraction logic applied to emotional assets that I've seen in my career. Content write-offs from the merger reached between $2.8 and $3.5 billion, and this wasn't failed work getting cut. This was finished work that was mercilessly deleted for accounting purposes. Coyote vs. Acme was a completed film with test scores 14 points above the family norm, shelved for a $30 million write-off rather than released. Batgirl. Westworld — a show with a genuinely passionate audience — was pulled from the platform entirely and rendered inaccessible to the people who'd built a relationship with it. By Q2 2024, WBD reported a $9.1 billion write-down on its TV networks, triggered by the book value of those assets being higher than their actual market value — which is the financial system's way of admitting that the extraction strategy destroyed more value than it created. The stock is down roughly 70% since the April 2022 merger, with over $41 billion in gross debt still on the books.
And the answer being pursued right now is more of the same, but bigger. In February 2026, Paramount Skydance finalized an $111 billion acquisition of WBD, with CEO David Ellison pledging to extract $6 billion annually in "cost synergies." Nobody's hiding the ball here. Industry analysts estimate 8,000 to 10,000 direct job losses — roughly double the pattern from the Disney-Fox merger. WBD employees told CNBC they were terrified. One long-term executive put it simply: "It's fair to say people are deflated." The people being described as "duplicative operations" are the ones maintaining the relationship between those brands and the audiences who grew up loving them. That's not overhead. That's the only reason any of those assets are worth anything.
And WBD is just the loudest version of a story that's been playing out quietly for two decades. BioWare still exists. So does Criterion. So do id Software and Maxis. The signs are still on the doors. But ask any fan what happened to those studios — not the games, the studios — and they'll tell you exactly when the culture left and who left with it. The IP persists. The relationship doesn't. Audiences feel that difference even when they can't name it. It shows up as a creeping disappointment that the thing they loved isn't quite the thing they loved anymore.
The Fortnite Sequence
The most honest admission I've seen of where all this leads came from Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, in the memo he sent this week announcing the layoff of over 1,000 employees — Epic's second major round of cuts in three years. Sweeney was clear: the layoffs aren't related to AI. The real culprit was games competing for time against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment. And then he wrote something that should make everyone in this industry stop and think: despite Fortnite remaining one of the most successful games in the world, Epic had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic with every season.
Here's the thing worth sitting with. Epic's first round of cuts, back in September 2023, targeted people outside core development — in practice, community managers, live events teams, engagement staff. The people whose entire job was making sure each season actually landed with the audience. Sweeney says the Fortnite engagement decline started in 2025 — about 18 months after those cuts. Nobody can draw a straight line between the two. But the sequence is exactly what you'd expect if removing the people who maintained the emotional relationship gradually degraded the ability to deliver consistent magic. The audience never got a memo saying those people were gone. They just started noticing, season by season, that something felt slightly off. And in a world with infinite alternatives, slightly off is enough.
Fortnite has 650 million registered players. The reach was never the problem. The problem is that in a landscape flooded with content — content the industry itself produced, funded by investors who wanted output machines instead of community architects — an inconsistent season sends your audience somewhere else, and getting them back is nearly impossible. Not because they stopped caring. Because they literally cannot hear you calling over everything else competing for the same hours.
You Can't Speed-Run a Relationship
And here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: even if you wanted to fix it, you can't fix it fast. Research from UCL's Phillippa Lally found that it takes an average of 66 days of consistent repetition for a new behavior to become automatic — and that's for something simple, like drinking a glass of water. The full range in the study ran from 18 to 254 days depending on complexity. A fandom isn't one habit. It's a stack of them — checking in with a community, following a season, recommending something to a friend, feeling like a brand actually knows who you are. Every single one of those has to be built through months of consistent, positive experience. You cannot acquire your way past that timeline. You cannot automate it. And when you interrupt it — bad season, broken promise, community team restructured out of existence — the habit doesn't pause. It starts dissolving, while every competitor in the market is actively working to build their own version of it in the same window. The audience doesn't wait around. They just find something else to make a habit of.
What concerns me most — and I say this as someone who's been on the inside of many of these ecosystems — is what happens to the expertise over time. The people being let go right now aren't just losing jobs. The industry is losing the accumulated knowledge of how to actually do this work. How to listen to a fandom at scale. How to build a community that develops its own gravity. How to keep an emotional relationship alive across product cycles and cultural shifts. That knowledge doesn't regenerate quickly. Students trying to break into the field are already caught in a cycle where employers want experienced candidates but the opportunities to build that experience are disappearing. The market is eating its own seed corn.
The First Invoice
Every time you activate a fandom without feeding it, you draw down a balance that isn't being replenished. Every piece of content produced to fill a release calendar rather than deepen a relationship adds to the noise, drowning out every other brand trying to be heard. Every community manager, brand storyteller, and narrative designer walking out the door in a restructuring is a year or more of irreplaceable context gone.
The bill has already started arriving. The layoffs, the write-downs, the engagement declines, the franchises that used to mean something now generating polite indifference — that's not turbulence. That's the first invoice.
But it gets much uglier if the industry doesn't course-correct. Carving up assets and calling it strategy only works until there's nothing left to carve. The companies that come out of this with something worth owning will be the ones that resisted the pressure to harvest what they built and kept building instead — with the same intentionality, the same patience, the same understanding that you cannot shortcut your way into a relationship with an audience. Extraction has a ceiling. Building doesn't. And right now, the ceiling is very, very close.
The Space the Giants Left Behind
And if you're starting out — whether you're an indie studio, a creator, a small publisher, or anyone building something from scratch — this is the one thing I want you to take from all of this: you have no choice but to build. There is no other path to sustainable growth. No acquisition shortcut, no content machine, no algorithm hack that replaces the slow, intentional work of earning an audience's trust over time.
More importantly: start before you think you need to. Way before you ship. The moment you have product fit — the moment you know what you're making and who it's for — that's when community building begins. Not at launch. Not after launch. Now. Because by the time your product is ready, the habit needs to already be forming. The relationship needs to already exist. The audience you want to have on day one has to have been finding you for months before day one arrives.
The giants are leaving space behind. That space belongs to the builders.
