Topic: PlayStation to axe 900 jobs and close London studio

Sony has announced it will lay off 8% of PlayStation employees globally, amounting to approximately 900 people.

In addition to cuts in the US and Japan, the gaming giant said this would mean closing PlayStation's London Studio entirely.

In a blog post sharing an email sent to employees, boss Jim Ryan called the move "sad news" and said it was "a difficult day at our company".

"We have concluded that tough decisions have become inevitable," he said.

"The leadership team and I made the incredibly difficult decision to restructure operations, which regrettably includes a reduction in our workforce impacting very talented individuals who have contributed to our success."

The cuts come a month after rival Microsoft revealed plans to lay off 1,900 people in its gaming division, which included those at recently-acquired Activision-Blizzard.

"Sony is one of the big pillars of UK game development culture so it's massive to see the legendary Sony London studio close in particular," said Halli Bjornsson, head of UK developer Lockwood Publishing.

"It's a challenging time for our industry as it continues to go through major changes.

"However, UK games talent and heritage is world class, and if we continue to foster it, we'll rebound and be in a good place to build upon the opportunities that are on the horizon."

FULL Article - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68404704?xtor=AL-72-%5B...

It is really sickening that the mistakes of management affect so many employees.

@Rudy_Manchego Yeah, as I commented over on the front page article, the unfortunate reality is that the layoffs are the easiest way to balance the budget, which was fraught with poor executive decisions and plans. As someone had commented there, the plans for 12 live-service games was simply too much for a fanbase to support. There’s not enough players and not enough hours in the day, for all those to hit and they’d end up cannibalizing each other for players’ attention.

With single player isolated experiences, they can be consumed by the dozens because after 20-80 hrs, a player will move on to the next game. A successful service game, after the model of Genshin, Fortnite, or Destiny, requires hundreds of hours which just aren’t available out there, at least not in my estimation. Perhaps they expected that they could siphon off players from Fortnite, Warzone, FFXIV, FIFA, etc, but more likely than not they’d pull players from the Horizon MMO to play the London Studios game, or from Helldivers to play the Factions game. The player base can simply only engage in so much at once.

@Th3solution Full agree good sir.

People keep focusing on the cost of developing tentpole AAA games as if that is what Sony had invested so much money in. Sure AAA Games are expensive and a risk - a new IP like Day's Gone does have to do well and all that. But they were ploughing a huge amount of funds into what they hoped would be a golden goose. Buying Bungie, investing heavily in live service games at Naughty Dog, Guerilla as well as investing in tech like PSVR2. A successful live service game is a cash cow for sure but they are so so rare. No one would have predicted that Helldivers 2 would explode like this but how many fails have there been in between?

I know the Iwata quotes about salary cuts are pulled out all the time but ultimately, bad choices have been made and profits are lower than promised to stakeholders. Execs should pay but they don't. The designers, the artists, the QA the engineers pay. Which means it is that much harder for Sony to make better games moving forward.

I'm just frustrated particularly with games media that keep citing games getting more expensive and all that when there is loads of money in the industry. It is that there is just a cap on money able to be spent and execs keep backing the wrong thing.

The ethical approach would have been for top Playstation execs to cut their salaries in penance for their mistakes, like Nintendo did during the Wii U era, but American corporate culture (especially in the tech industry) is pure evil and is almost inherently short-sighted in terms of how its behavior will impact it down the road.

@Kidfried True dat. Did you see the photos of Ryan celebrating his retirement last week at the London Studio.

As @Ralizah says, ethics and corporate culture don't mix. As a leading publisher, Sony lives and dies by making good software to entice hardware sales and generate revenue. It takes years to develop or scale up competent studios. So if there is a resurgence in the industry, they and all the other publishers are going to miss experienced staff and studios.

@Kidfried Crucially, the PlayStation division was still primarily Japanese at the time.

Appeasing shareholders and raising stock prices through layoffs is such a short-sighted view. Cool, they've reduced costs, great for the stock-holding grannies that have no idea what a pLaYsTaTiOn is, but now how do they get a varied lineup of products out in a timely manner to generate future revenues? Capitalism never looks very far ahead and it always comes back to bite corporations in the arse.

Jim Ryan has his golden parachute waiting, what does he care about "tough decisions". It absolutely stinks. I do not know how much responsibility Hermen Hulst holds either, but Sony's recent strategy shift has been eyebrow raising and will now take years to course correct. On this very site it was said that Sony only needed one hit out of the multitude of live-service games they were planning, but that one hit - even if it happened - would not only have to recoup its own development costs and justify ongoing support, it would have to make up for the losses incurred from the other failures, even before it makes a profit. Wouldn't it? It's baffling, given how hard to crack the live-service market is. Particularly given how lucrative the license fees from third-party live-service titles are for Sony.

@Kidfried A pay cut would have been a gesture of solidarity. Not that it would have stopped redundancies, but it stings given how much executive retirement payoffs often are.

The news about Sony's layoffs is heartbreaking, especially with the closure of PlayStation's London Studio, which has been such an important part of the UK gaming scene. It’s easy to imagine the uncertainty and stress many are feeling right now. But even in tough times, new opportunities can often come from unexpected places.