Layoffs and the UA function

Every downturn in games has hit UA teams in a particular order, and the current one is no different. Creative production headcount goes first, since testing a smaller slate of concepts costs less than maintaining a large in-house team. Junior media buying roles follow as automated bidding tools absorb more of the day-to-day optimisation work. Only later, if at all, do the cuts reach the analysts together with the leads who hold the institutional knowledge of what actually worked.

That sequencing matters because it's rarely the sequencing a cost-cutting exercise intends.

A studio under pressure to reduce spend typically models headcount reduction against current output, cutting the roles that look most replaceable by a vendor or a tool in the near term. Automated bidding inside AppLovin's Axon, Meta's Advantage+ and Google's Smart+ genuinely does reduce the manual optimisation work a junior buyer used to do, which makes those roles an easy first target. What gets lost in that calculation is that junior buyers are also where a team trains its future senior hires. A studio that cuts that layer entirely during a downturn often finds itself two or three years later with senior roles it can't backfill from inside the organisation, because there is no pipeline left.

The knowledge loss problem nobody budgets for

Creative fatigue curves, cohort quality baselines by channel, the specific quirks of a studio's own MMP configuration: none of this lives in a document anyone reads before a layoff decision, and most of it leaves with the person who built it. A test registry or a decision log, the kind of documentation an experimentation-minded UA team should already be keeping, becomes genuinely valuable during a downsizing precisely because it's the only thing that survives the headcount cut. Studios that never built that documentation discipline in growth years pay for it during contraction. They relearn the hard way what a departed analyst already knew.

The broader consolidation environment this year gives some sense of the pressure driving these decisions even where individual studio cuts aren't public. Savvy Games Group's leadership change at the start of September, following roughly 38 billion dollars of PIF-backed gaming investment across Scopely as well as Niantic and Moonton, is one visible sign that even the largest, best-capitalised portfolios are under scrutiny for how that scale translates into returns. A portfolio company under that kind of scrutiny passes cost discipline down to its studios' own budgets. UA included.

The shift toward agency and vendor-managed buying that often accompanies a cost-cutting cycle carries its own risk if it happens without a clear handover process. An agency stepping in to run media buying a departing in-house team previously owned inherits the account structure and the campaign history; it rarely inherits the tacit knowledge of why the team excluded a particular audience segment, or why it retired a certain creative concept after underperformance the raw metrics alone don't explain. A UA lead managing a transition like this well insists on a documented handover period rather than a hard cutover, even when the budget pressure driving the change makes that overlap feel like an indulgence. Skip it and the studio tends to relearn the same lessons an agency's own testing eventually surfaces, at the cost of weeks or months of wasted spend along the way. Treating the handover itself as a deliverable, with a written account of what the team has already tried and why, is cheap insurance against the more expensive mistake of paying twice to discover the same dead end.

Running a smaller team without losing rigour

The teams handling contraction best aren't the ones protecting headcount at all costs, since that's rarely a decision within a UA lead's control anyway. They're the ones that triage deliberately. They keep the measurement and experimentation discipline intact even as buying execution shifts more heavily to an agency or an automated bidding tool, because a smaller team that still knows whether a campaign is actually incremental is in a far stronger position than a larger team running on habit. Automation can absorb execution. It can't absorb the judgment of knowing which number to trust, and that judgment is the one thing worth protecting explicitly when a headcount reduction is coming, rather than assuming it survives by default.

Related archive reading

These articles provide related context and remain subject to their stated review status.

• The hidden fixed costs of a paid UA operation
• The M&A map: what consolidation does to buyers