In the latest case of a video game developer being forced to reduce their workforce after failing to adequately realize their own overzealous expansion plans, Sony has announced that their PlayStation division will soon be saying good-bye to roughly 900 of their colleagues from across the globe.
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Sony’s standing as the latest entity to suffer a staffing hit amidst the industry’s ongoing wave of layoffs was first confirmed on the morning of January 27th courtesy of a message – first shared internally to employees before later being made available to the public via an official company blog post – penned by Sony Interactive Entertainment President & CEO Jim Ryan.
“The PlayStation community means everything to us, so I felt it was important to update you on a difficult day at our company,” explained Ryan in introduction to the public blog post. “We have made the extremely hard decision to announce our plan to commence a reduction of our overall headcount globally by about 8% or about 900 people, subject to local law and consultation processes. Employees across the globe, including our studios, are impacted.”
“These are incredibly talented people who have been part of our success, and we are very grateful for their contributions,” he added. “However, the industry has changed immensely, and we need to future ready ourselves to set the business up for what lies ahead. 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.”
To this end, Ryan revealed in his internal message that, in addition to the aforementioned global staffing cuts, this company restructuring would also specifically result in the complete closure of PlayStation’s London Studio – perhaps best known for their work on the SingStar series – and significant “reductions” at Horizon Call of the Mountain VR developer Firesprite studio.
In a separate blog post, Head of PlayStation Studios head Herment Hulst confirmed that these layoffs would also affect Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 developer Insomniac Games, The Last of Us series developer Naughty Dog, and Sony’s Technology, Creative, and Support teams.
“We have brought brilliant and successful Studios into our family,” said Hulst. “We have invested in new technology and partnerships. We have recruited talent from across our industry and beyond. But growth itself is not an ambition.”
Further, the studio head confirmed that as part of these staffing shake-ups, “We looked at our studios and our portfolio, evaluating projects in various stages of development, and have decided that some of those projects will not move forward.”
Unfortunately for those curious, both Hulst and Sony have yet to provide and details as to which titles have now found themselves on the cutting room floor.
Sony Interactive Entertainment’s staff cuts are but the latest in a string of layoffs currently sweeping across the Western video game industry.
As previously reported, thanks to spending the last four years overexpanding their operations under the belief that the ‘COVID lockdown video game boom’ would last forever, numerous companies including Activision Blizzard, Xbox, Microsoft proper, Riot Games, and even video game streaming platform Twitch have seen their workforces absolutely shredded in service of cutting costs.