Insomniac, the dev team behind the wildly successful Spider-Man games just had a leak. In the leak, it’s discovered that they were strong-armed by Sony (who owns Insomniac) to downsize staff despite exceeding sales targets and hitting goals. They needed to downsize to help balance Sony’s books, who have acquired a slew of failing or underperforming studios.

Sony owns Studio A, and Studio B. Studio B have underperformed for the last few years, whilst Studio A has outperformed their targets. Because of the shortcomings in Studio B, Sony are now out of pocket, even accounting for the earnings of Studio A. Studio A are forced to eliminate staff roles to make up for Studio B’s mismanagement. A well oiled and well performing Studio have to butcher their teams to balance their parent entity’s books. It’s so fucking short sighted and stupid.

This isn’t just a Sony/Insomniac issue either, I guarantee this goes on throughout the industry whenever there’s a parent company. It’s just how it will always be in those circumstances.

Seems patently anti-player, but pro shareholder. It’s so clear cut.

I tend to be pretty pessimistic about these cases. Even if the UK Govt win, Google won’t change anything, or if they do the change will be subtle enough to not have any impact