LogInReportedly, around 140 people are "at risk" in the London office alone.
Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, King, Autodesk – in 2025, industry-wide layoffs and the growing enthusiasm for generative AI among tech moguls seem to be going hand in hand, with reports of human workers being replaced by AI becoming increasingly more common as the year goes on.
Joining this list is Square Enix, which announced plans to "improve productivity by utilizing AI" and carried out mass layoffs across "nearly all areas" of its businesses outside Japan, and most strikingly, did so on the same day.
Square Enix
In its latest Progress Report on the Medium-Term Business Plan, Square Enix revealed that, under the banner of promoting AI usage in Japan, it plans to automate 70% of QA and debugging tasks in game development by the end of 2027 using generative AI.
To achieve this, the company established a joint research team of more than ten members, composed of researchers from the Matsuo Laboratory at the University of Tokyo and engineers from the Square Enix group. With this initiative, the company hopes to "improve the efficiency of QA operations and establish a competitive advantage in game development through AI technologies."
"But what about those Debuggers and QA Specialists whose tasks Square Enix wants to automate?" many asked. And sadly, hours after the announcement, several reports provided a swift, jarring, yet unsurprising answer.
While no official statements have been released as of yet, the reports indicated that Square Enix conducted mass layoffs across all of its Western operations, affecting staff in IT, marketing, publishing, sales, QA, business planning, and other departments.
Purportedly, Square Enix president Takashi Kiryu said the company will implement a "fundamental restructuring of the overseas publishing organization" to create a more "lean" and "agile" business abroad, and as such corporate-speak always implies, some employees will be restructured out of the company. How many? Only Square's leadership knows for sure, though one European ex-employee claimed that nearly 140 people in the London office alone were told they were "at risk," out of a total headcount of around 4,600.
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