We need to talk about layoffs — but not in the way you might think.

Recently, I’ve seen a wave of conversation. The headlines are everywhere, the pain is real, and the empathy within our community is palpable. People are hurting, and acknowledging that matters. At the same time, a quieter truth exists in the background: hiring is still happening, just carefully, behind closed doors and out of the public spotlight. Both realities—deep cuts and quiet onboarding—are coexisting right now.

But focusing only on that emotional surface misses the point entirely.

The real question we should be asking ourselves, the one almost nobody seems to be tackling, is much deeper: Why does this machine keep breaking down in vicious cycles? Why, after every boom, do we face a bust that forces our friends and colleagues out the door?

From where I sit, deep inside AAA production, I see the same structural failures repeating themselves long before a single HR email is ever sent. It starts when teams scale too fast, driven by ambition or external pressure, without a corresponding evolution in how we actually work.

Pipelines don’t magically scale just because you add 50 more artists or designers; in fact, they often groan under the weight. As the team grows, true ownership gets diluted.

Instead of one clear person steering a feature, responsibility fragments, and suddenly, nobody knows who is accountable for a critical decision. Integration inevitably breaks at the seams, turning a smooth production flow into a chaotic fight against friction.

And then pressure hits. A milestone slips, a budget gets challenged, or a publisher gets nervous. At that critical moment, companies don’t stop to fix the twisted system. They don't ask, "How did our process fail to absorb this growth?" Instead, they reach for the most visible, blunt instrument available: they reset the headcount. It’s treated as a simple correction, a valve to release steam, rather than a fundamental failure of operational strategy.

This is the uncomfortable truth: without real production stability at scale, layoffs aren’t a strategic choice.

They are an automatic, predictable correction mechanism. It’s a cycle that won’t stop — no matter how many new people we hire during the next upswing — until we commit to building systems that are as resilient as the incredible talent we bring into this industry.