61–70 of 108 posts
Here's a separate press release from PlayStation Studios has more details: https://sonyinteractive.com/en/news/blog/an-important-update... In particular it lists some other studios not mentioned in this one: The US based studios and groups impacted by a reduction in workforce are: * Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, as well as our Technology, Creative, and Support teams In UK and European based studios, it is proposed: *…
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…
Really impressed by how many highly profitable companies have turned themselves inside out to arrive at this same "extremely hard decision." Either those words are a bit empty or you just have to admire recent levels of corporate bravery.
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 reason…
https://www.ft.com/content/cc6bd66c-6341-4367-85cc-86d274102...
> Game over? Industry suffers slowdown after decades-long winning streak
> Sales growth in consoles and mobile apps hit as a darkening mood spreads across $200bn video games sector
> The $200bn video games industry is reckoning with its biggest slowdown in 30 years, as the huge growth driven by smartphone gaming and the latest generation of consoles reaches its limits.
> Hardware sales are slowing, with Sony cutting its forecast for PlayStation 5 sales this week. Consumer spending on mobile gaming declined last year, down 2 per cent to $107.3bn according to Data.ai, which forecasts low single-digit growth in 2024.
What I would dearly love is for Microsoft and Sony to recognize that nobody wants to release platform-exclusive titles that cut the audience in half, and pivot the console industry away from being mutually-incompatible bespoke devices and towards being a blessed open PC configuration that gets battle-tested, mass produced, and LTS-supported. Architecturally they’re 90% of the way there having AMD CPU+GPUs under the h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course they're still profitable. But instead of making a gazillion-and-one dollars, like they "forecasted", they only made a gazillion dollars. So, in the interest of "maximising shareholder value" and maintaining "growth", the board has now concluded that heads must roll for this.
It's not just a question of shareholder value and profits always needing to go up - there are real society-wide opportunity costs to companies like Sony continuing as before. All of the workers they employ and the resources they use are workers and resources that cannot instead be producing other things, and the increase in interest rates that's lead to all these layoff is essentially a signal that those opportunity…
I'm a big believer in co-operatives and shared ownership, but then I should probably also face the reality that if you make it too comfortable for some people, they would just grow fat/lazy and not work at all, so perhaps all this "fire under your arse" and competition is good for us all.
A calculation Nathan Brown (Hit Points newsletter) made a year ago when Microsoft laid off 10% of its workforce:
> According to the salary-tracking website Comparably, the median Microsoft salary is $162,818 per year. Blowing the dust off the trusty Hit Points calculator, it appears that if Microsoft pulled out of the Activision deal and put that $68.7bn towards employee salaries instead, it could keep the 10,000 staff it is laying off today on the books for over 41 years.
(substack seems to be croaking, so no direct link, sorry)
Again, Microsoft is not a charity, but it does make you think: they'd rather be a monopoly than show some loyalty to their workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> You think there is not one manager involved in layoffs that faced personal grief over firing people?
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…
Not all projects have long development-time, and not all jobs in gaming are for developers. And in the first place, nobody knew how long the pandemia and the gaming-hype would last.
> It isn't like they could hire during the boom and expect to get anything out within a reasonable amount of time.
Actually you can, they don't need to be masterpieces, but churning out something in 18+ Months if you are an already established company is not that hard. Especially when you already have some projects with years of planning in your archive. And there are also many projects which are getting abandoned half-way when it turns out to be a bad case.
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.
Sony is saying PS5 is entering ‘The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle’[0] while there are only 13 PS5 exclusive titles available [1]. So PS5 is propably not doing well. [0] https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-entering-the-latter-stage-o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_ga...
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/franchise/playstationstudios
Why not do this for every country? This type of support should be required for mass layoffs.
I understand the strategic impact of such large decisions but I don't understand why these types of programs can't be implemented in the 21st century even if laws need to necessitate such programs existence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sony is saying PS5 is entering ‘The Latter Stage of Its Life Cycle’[0] while there are only 13 PS5 exclusive titles available [1]. So PS5 is propably not doing well. [0] https://www.ign.com/articles/ps5-entering-the-latter-stage-o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_ga...
I spoke with some console game devs who worked with PS5 title: there is a major problem with AAA title development. Because the games have become so big, it takes 5 years to produce one. The console life cycle is 5 years as well. Thus, as a game studio, you can only cram one AAA title for each console generation. Then you need to start from the scratch with new console, new SDKs, new bugs and so on.