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Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

sonyinteractive.com

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Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#51

Post by prmoustache »

slothtrop wrote: post #12
neocritter wrote: post #4

Is this one of those "we're doing great, you're fired" situations, or is there a real market reason? The PS5 seems to be selling well.

They recently announced that PS5 is entering it's twilight phase. Sold better than series X but apparently not well enough. We're still getting new games released for both ps4 and ps5, and the value added on the latter appears marginal.

I only own a switch but if I had to buy a console right now I would buy a second hand ps4 over a ps5 and max out its internal storage. Much cheaper and huge list of games, many available for very cheap on the second hand market.

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#52

Post by dirtybirdnj »

xp84 wrote: post #49
Spivak wrote: post #5

It must be fun to be paid millions to write boilerplate "our incredible journey" garbage and pretend it's serious. They just announced 7% growth sales forecast prior to the layoffs, they aren't a struggling company that needs to buy more runaway. God I just wish one executive had the balls to say, "yeah we're culling 8% of our staff largely randomly because we estimated our dead weight is greater than that." It would…

It doesn’t seem like you’ve gotten to know anybody who’s implemented a RIF. I have and every manager involved right up to the CEO fucking hates the whole thing. It makes you sick to your stomach, and they realize that no matter how much they hate doing it, many of those affected will still think they’re callous jerks for it. It’s just business.

it's not the action it's the lack of accountability for the action

none of the people swinging the axe face any pain for their bad decisions. people under them working as hard as they could face the consequences of decisions made above their head and out of their control.

no contrition, no sincerity, no humanity. the C level has failed us and we keep celebrating their narcissism and psychopathy.

we cannot keep celebrating this behavior. it needs to have negative financial consequences or the "bad optics" will forever just be a cost of doing business

we need adults in charge and we have pathetic children

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#53

Post by xp84 »

fooqux wrote: post #8
dtx1 wrote: post #3

It's not the worst "y'all are fired mail" we've seen in recent times but notice how the first two paragraphs, the most dense and buzzword ridden parts of the letter, do not include a concrete reason why they are reducing their workforce. After that part it becomes very precise and readable.

> do not include a concrete reason why they are reducing their workforce They're always one of two things: 1) the company is failing and we need to do this to stay afloat; or 2) the board thinks we can make more money by doing a round of layoffs and have determined that the negative repercussions of this are worth that money. I wasn't able to easily find revenue numbers on SIE, just on Sony as a whole, but it seems p…

> a few extremely rich people

There are a lot more than 900 shareholders, though. Including probably many of those laid off.

> losing their livelihoods

I know that this is a real expression, and you’re using it correctly of course, but the caliber of employees we are talking about here are not ending up begging on the streets. They’re being forced to interview for other jobs where their talents might be put to better use. A bummer but not the end of the world. I’d prefer this to having a bunch of dysfunctional, uncompetitive companies that did makework programs to avoid having difficult conversations.

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#54

Post by Solvency »

nerdjon wrote: post #21

I really wish we had more concrete information on what caused this. Is this a downturn in gaming and revenue and actually needing to do this to stay afloat or just the company seeing lower than expected sales but still profitable. I know that they announced that the PS5 sold lower than expected but they also mentioned exploring other platforms for their games. Playstation has a reputation of all of their games doing…

It's called keeping the line up. Shareholders and wealthy people like that sort of thing.

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#55

Post by opyate »

nerdjon wrote: post #35
warp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming saw a huge increase during the COVID-19 pandemic, and companies staffed up, because they either had a bunch more money coming in or it was easy to get investments. All these gaming layoffs to me seem like a correction back to pre-covid levels. We've also seen a bunch of consolidation in recent years, which in itself makes some positions redundant.

So I know a lot of the tech (non gaming) layoffs were correcting the over-hiring during covid. However I did not think gaming did the same thing. Especially given the long development timelines for games now it wouldn't have made as much sense. It isn't like they could hire during the boom and expect to get anything out within a reasonable amount of time. Is there anything out there talking about gaming also doing a…

> Is there anything out there talking about gaming also doing a big hiring push during covid?

Check out GameDiscoverCo on substack - Simon's mentioned it a few times. Unfortunately, substack seems to be having technical difficulties, so I can't link anything.

And then these guys mention it a couple of times in their podcast: https://gamecraftpod.com/

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#56

Post by kmlx »

jodacola wrote: post #44

Ah, more layoffs! Setting aside the things I'm feeling when reading this, I'm trying to piece together a picture, for my own curiosity, of this trend, and I'm left with many questions, among those: * Are all these layoffs meaningfully based in some hard economic data (e.g. end of ZIRP and some real analytical assessments of the direction of the economy)? * Or, is this some form of corporate herd mentality? There's no…

if we're discussing averages, it's a bit of everything. there's clearly an imbalance right now and things are adjusting.

if we're discussing an individual company, it depends.

what i do know from some companies that i work with is this:

- some have massively over-hired during covid and now they're trimming

- some have been greatly affected by inflation/interest rates

- some have seen sales nosedive for various reasons

- some have simply replaced roles with AI

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#57

Post by op00to »

dirtybirdnj wrote: post #52
xp84 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t seem like you’ve gotten to know anybody who’s implemented a RIF. I have and every manager involved right up to the CEO fucking hates the whole thing. It makes you sick to your stomach, and they realize that no matter how much they hate doing it, many of those affected will still think they’re callous jerks for it. It’s just business.

it's not the action it's the lack of accountability for the action none of the people swinging the axe face any pain for their bad decisions. people under them working as hard as they could face the consequences of decisions made above their head and out of their control. no contrition, no sincerity, no humanity. the C level has failed us and we keep celebrating their narcissism and psychopathy. we cannot keep celebr…

> none of the people swinging the axe face any pain for their bad decisions

You think there is not one manager involved in layoffs that faced personal grief over firing people?

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#58

Post by Magodo »

jodacola wrote: post #44

Ah, more layoffs! Setting aside the things I'm feeling when reading this, I'm trying to piece together a picture, for my own curiosity, of this trend, and I'm left with many questions, among those: * Are all these layoffs meaningfully based in some hard economic data (e.g. end of ZIRP and some real analytical assessments of the direction of the economy)? * Or, is this some form of corporate herd mentality? There's no…

Every company mid sized onwards has dedicated FP&A teams that do rolling forecasts at least 2 quarters into the future and also have an operating plan (budget) decided before the FY begins. Projections go out to Wall Street. Executives look at top line summaries, upcoming revenue streams, profitability ratios and so on. Decisions are made on those numbers

Re: Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people

#59

Post by FpUser »

Spivak wrote: post #5

It must be fun to be paid millions to write boilerplate "our incredible journey" garbage and pretend it's serious. They just announced 7% growth sales forecast prior to the layoffs, they aren't a struggling company that needs to buy more runaway. God I just wish one executive had the balls to say, "yeah we're culling 8% of our staff largely randomly because we estimated our dead weight is greater than that." It would…

>"God I just wish one executive had the balls to say, "yeah we're culling 8% of our staff largely randomly because we estimated our dead weight is greater than that." It would at least treat employees as adults that can have adult conversations and take bad news."

Employees could see things for what those are. Spelling it out will not make any difference for them. For executive statement like this could be reason to join that terminated crowd.

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