Ziff Davis lays off eight IGN staff and 12% of union

Parent company of entertainment website IGN, Ziff Davis, has laid off eight staff members and 12% of new union the IGN Creators Guild. The redundancies follow Ziff Davis acquiring a number of Gamer Network publications earlier this year and laying off 23 people and 15% of the Ziff Davis Creators Guild union across other publications like CNET, PCMag and Mashable last week.

Today, IGN laid off eight extremely valuable members of our union and workforce via directive from our parent company, Ziff Davis. This, after two incredibly successful live events IGN Live and SDCC, and yet another corporate acquisition.Please take a moment to read and share our full statement:

— IGN Union (@ignunion.bsky.social) 2025-08-04T21:20:55.318Z

In a statement posted to Bluesky, the IGN Union said the layoffs stemmed from a Ziff Davis mandate to cut costs, despite “several quarters in a row of year-over-year revenue increases”. This also follows the laying off of three unionised staff members last year after the union went public.

The statement also notes that “IGN is choosing to eliminate the individuals who ensure IGN remains competitive as generative AI threatens our reach… This continued cycle of repeated, aggressive cuts to our staff and being asked to do more with less, only for management to continue to spend on new business it isn’t interested in sustaining cannot continue”.

Laid-off IGN staff include video editor Chelsea Reed, senior features editor Matt Kim, gaming editorial events manager Rob Manuel, and entertainment reviews editor Erik Adams.

This comes amidst ongoing turbulence in videogame journalism more broadly, including the sunsetting of Kotaku Australia last year and the sale of Polygon earlier this year.

The IGN Creators Guild was formed and recognised in 2024 as a union of IGN’s creative teams and its associated channels.