High interest rates make investing in risky projects like game development uninteresting. Why take risk if interest rates bring in high returns by themselves.

A lot of the games industry is backed by a constant flow of investment. Which has totally dried up. This company got 80 million in investment last year, this year can’t find more to keep paying the bills. Same is true for most of the announcements.

Then there is large companies like Microsoft, those layoffs are purely about paying shareholders extea money.