Member-only story
5 Ways to Survive Game UX Budget Cuts
Your game studio doesn’t need more user feelings. It needs you to prevent its next $2M disaster.
I’ve seen too many UX researchers get laid off from major gaming studios on LinkedIn in the last couple of years. It’s an epidemic. Ever feel like you’re the Cassandra of game development — constantly predicting disasters that nobody wants to hear about until it’s too late? Well, I’ve got a guide for you today (and a ChatGPT prompt at the very end to help you find better UX framing strategies).
The fact is that in today’s economic climate, UX research teams are getting axed faster than red shirts in a Star Trek episode. High interest rates have executives treating UXR like an expensive luxury rather than essential infrastructure. That makes no sense to me as someone, who advocates for the value of UX every day. But I’m sitting behind the heavy curtains of the ivory tower, while companies are demanding immediate return on investment (ROI) from research that, by its very nature, prevents problems that haven’t happened yet. It’s like asking a smoke detector to prove its worth by pointing to all the fires it didn’t detect. Survivorship bias, anyone? The pressure is real though, the budgets are shrinking, and frankly, a lot of standout researchers are finding themselves on the wrong side of a pink…
