Sony is to lay off 900 people, equating to eight percent of its workforce.
We need to deliver on expectations from developers and gamers and continue to propel future technology in gaming, so we took a step back to ensure we are set up to continue bringing the best gaming experiences to the community.
This is such bullshit corporate speak. In other words, in order to make our stock go up, we had to cut jobs, and lower the quality of our products, while doubling the work of those who haven’t been laid off.
I’m so fucking sick of being told how great the economy and stock market are doing when it really translates to “executives are automating away their workers and making insane amounts of money off it.”
On a Game Mess Mornings (yesterday, I think?) it was something like $600M profit on a $7B investment, which are some thin margins, and things are trending in the other direction, which means it’s not sustainable. Anyone looking at $300M budgets for a Spider-Man game and $200M for Horizon could wager a guess that it’s not sustainable. The blame still lies at the feet of Sony for stretching themselves so thin in the first place and then axing these people who potentially uprooted their lives to take these jobs, but it doesn’t make sense to keep throwing money at things like PSVR2 games or live service schemes that won’t make their money back.
Maybe they should stop budgeting so much for video games. Nobody is forcing them to make everything 4k graphic open world games where you can do anything you want.
I think the new management at Sony agrees, but what that means is that people get laid off.
As if this existing studio has been corrupted by Sony’s big budgets, and putting together a whole new studio will cost less than telling one group to figure out how to make two games.
If only costs, personnel, and risk could be divided that easily.
Right, because tanking a working company with nine hundred people is cheap and simple.
Long-term, it is in fact cheaper to not pay 900 people than it is to pay them.
And blame the job cuts on improvements made available through smart AI automations.
All for our stock to tick a bit higher and make a couple of more millions more as a bonus to our CEO.
This recent trend of cutting workforce in order to drive share prices even higher will most probably backfire at some point. I just hope those employees manage to find a better job.
“We’re working on an online multiplayer game set in a modern day, fantasy London. This is a brand new IP and we can’t wait to share more when we’re ready!”
Someone did a Ubisoft
Hellgate: London deserved better than what it got.
Absolutely, I poured tons of time into that game with buddies of mine back in the day.
It just had the bad luck of competing with WoW at the height of it’s popularity. Didn’t really stand a chance.
This is sad. It’s probably because Sony doesn’t make money.
Sony makes lots of money, huge amounts. Billions in profit. This has nothing to do with actual money made.
Nope, Sony has no more money. Haven’t you heard?
It was a joke
What the fuck, an entire studio too? PS has been doing great too? It really doesn’t fucking matter how hard you work
Karma for them killing Japan Studio.
Karma for who? Sony will likely get an improved stock price from doing this and 900 people lost their livelihood. Have some compassion.
LMAO the only people suffering are the people that lost their jobs, how is that karma?
