Game industry layoffs since 2022 have removed more than 58,000 jobs from the workforce — a toll 1UP Ventures analyst Amir Satvat now compares to the 1983 North American console crash. Two studio co-founders laid off in 2025 are betting that bootstrapping a small indie operation is safer than waiting for the next restructuring cycle. Both intend to ship without a dollar of outside capital.

Airlock Games was founded last year by Justin Fischer and Brock Feldman after Warner Bros shuttered Player First Games seven months after acquiring the studio post-Multiversus 1.0. The pair are releasing sci-fi horror management sim What the Stars Forgot off a $25,000 Kickstarter.

Big Dumb Games launched at the start of 2026, formed by Murray Pannell, Phil O'Connor and several other ex-Everreach Labs colleagues. Their co-op space survival title Starship Bloopers is unfunded, with co-founder savings covering operations.

What does the indie path cost in practice?

Both teams describe steep pay cuts as the entry price. Big Dumb Games offers profit-share to anyone joining instead of a salary. Pannell, whose career spans marketing and publishing roles at Electronic Arts, Xbox, PlayStation, Ubisoft and 2K, framed the logic plainly:

"There are so many great people with great ideas and skills who are currently not putting that to good use because they haven't got a job... Yes, we might not be able to pay you today, but in a world where we make some money, we will hopefully all be buying Ferraris and living in Barbados."

The studio is unfunded as of launch and is targeting grants or seed capital later. Pannell has also taken a concurrent role as head of publishing at Steel City Interactive, developer of boxing sim Undisputed, to keep cash flow steady.

O'Connor, whose resume includes Ubisoft, Codemasters and 2K Australia, says the founders will absorb the largest hit. "Once you're responsible for all the spending, you realise how much the runway depends on how much you pay everybody," he says. "And we certainly are going to take a pay cut."

Fischer says Airlock Games is similarly bare-bones, drawing on the Warner Bros severance packages he and Feldman received after the Multiversus shutdown. "It's definitely scrappy," he says. "It's bootstrap for sure."

Why are these veterans skipping outside capital?

Fischer attributed Player First Games' closure to broader free-to-play headwinds rather than a single product failure. He told GamesIndustry.biz: "It's just user acquisition costs are hard for everybody. Free-to-play has been taking a beating, and it wasn't just Multiversus."

Two operational reasons pushed Airlock away from raising capital:

• Scope discipline: "We can fail fast" and avoid a $30 million budget for a multiplayer competitive game
• Authority preservation: the duo wants "to not sell parts of the company and just be able to totally bootstrap this ourselves"

At Big Dumb Games, the calculus runs similar. Pannell said the team chose self-funding over pitching VCs who had largely rotated into AI. The reasoning lands on one controllable variable. As Fischer put it: "We can't control what the publisher scene looks like, but we can control what we're making, and how we ship it, and how we communicate with an audience."

What's hard about being a senior AAA hire right now?

O'Connor says he has not seen recruiting this tight at any point in his career. "I've never encountered such difficulty in finding work and generating new projects," he says. "It became kind of a brick wall recently." Recruiters, he noted, have advised him to drop mention of his 30 years of experience from applications.

O'Connor and his wife, also a game developer, are tired of relocating. They have stopped moving and started building instead. The rationale: "It's less risky to be the masters of our own fate rather than depending on the game industry, which is not a dependable partner."

What changes when you go indie?

Agency, the founders say, more than income.

Fischer, who used to handle producer-track work at Player First, now touches audio and dialogue at Airlock. "I get to work a lot of sides of my brain every day," he says, "and that just is really satisfying, really engaging, really fun."

Pannell called the trade-off "probably one of the most rewarding years of my life, albeit probably the least financially rewarding."

O'Connor framed it as the only viable path forward. "I want to keep doing it until I'm no longer able to," he says. "I can't contemplate doing anything else."

What to watch

• Airlock Games' planned release of What the Stars Forgot on a no-investment budget
• Big Dumb Games' Starship Bloopers launch and any seed round close
• The next quarterly layoff tally against the 58,000-since-2022 baseline; Satvat's 1UP Ventures tracker is the leading public dataset in the space

Satvat, speaking to Edge magazine, set the macro frame: "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. That is ground zero for destruction."