Yesterday didn’t start with coffee for me. It started with another headline: 1,000 people laid off at Disney.

Honestly, it doesn’t even matter which department got hit. The pattern is painfully familiar by now.

When companies cut at this scale, they tell themselves it’s just a cost-saving move. But that’s not what’s really happening. They’re also deleting the memory of how their own systems actually work — the unwritten rules, the “why we do this instead of that,” the little fixes that keep everything from falling apart.

And that’s where the real danger hides.

In game production, we don’t see the damage right away. It shows up with a delay — usually 12 to 24 months later.

Suddenly, launches slow down. Pipelines that used to run smoothly start cracking under normal pressure. Teams spend more time trying to figure out what was already decided than actually building things. Why? Because the people who carried that context are gone.

Here’s something I’ve learned: crisis doesn’t create weak systems. It just reveals them.

So let’s call it what it is. Senior talent is not overhead. It’s the only layer that can hold complexity together when things stop being predictable — when a build fails at 2 AM, when a publisher changes requirements, when a key tool breaks.

Yes, you can optimize headcount. Spreadsheets look better for a quarter or two. But you cannot shortcut experience.

The real question was never “how much do these people cost?”

Senior talent isn’t a cost — it’s your production memory. You can cut it to improve short-term numbers. But you will pay for it later. In delays. In rework. In lost trust from your teams and your players.

So here’s the only question that matters now:
Are you building a system that survives pressure — or one that breaks quietly, 18 months after you fired the people who knew how to fix it?

Think about that before the next round of layoffs.