If you are naïve enough to think that the video games industry is an equal partnership between those a pursuing an artistic vision and their benevolent financial benefactors, then todays news that Activision Blizzard is laying off approximately 800 staff despite a enjoying a “record year”, must have comes as a surprise. For the rest of us who are fully conversant with the iniquities of the business, this sad news has an air of tedious inevitability to it. If you want a coherent distillation of the unsustainability of the triple A games industry, then Jim Sterling’s latest episode of The Jimquisition pretty much nails it. Simply put the current levels of revenue growth seen of late by a lot of the major publishers cannot be maintained and will eventually end in a hard crash, further job losses and a migration of venture capitalists looking to make a killing somewhere else. For those who work in games development it means job insecurity, stress and financial worries. For gamers it could lead to popular titles being shutdown because they don’t make “sufficient” revenue.