PlayStation Cutting 900 Jobs And Cancelling Games, Affecting Spider-Man, Last Of Us, And Horizon Developers

London Studio getting shutdown?

Ouch!

I pray for all the people this affects and their family and friends. May God bless and keep them and give all those who need them new better jobs soon.

God bless everyone.

Sony should stop censoring niche games and start investing in more first-party exclusives. PS3 and PS4 had a ton of great exclusives. PS5 only has Demon's Souls and FF16. If they had any sense, they would make Bloodborne 2 and stop isolating their player base with ridiculous censorship policies.

I know sony has been publicly traded forever but these corporations have ruined gaming. Gaming used to be fun, developers used to take risks. Now every company is a publicly traded company and has to come back to the investors with results. Games today are all the same and try to squeeze every dollar out of you; even years after you purchased the game. I miss the old days

All of the cuts should've came from guerilla, insomniac and naughty dog theyre bleeding Sony dry making the same games over and over how the hell does spider man cost 100 million and the sequel with the same city and assets cost 300 million? It's bullshit they're closing a studio that makes original games and hasn't had their chance to shine

The last paragraph states it all. "to improve shareholder value." So to hell with the general value of people, it's only for shareholders. Shows what the World has become. Nobody wants to improve anymore, only a few get rich while all others suffer. Sickening.

Live service, and ESG has killed so much in gaming. Hopefully these large companies can course correct.

It’s time for Sony to follow Microsoft’s lead and let a few exclusives go to other consoles. Given the spiralling cost of development, it’s crazy that platform holders exclude a large chunk of the gaming market from buying their games.

I think the picture here is that they cut most of the live service games in production when they realise that the chances of a GaaS be popular and profitable are like winning the lottery. Too many examples lately of failing big budget GaaS, Anthem was the beginning of the end of that model probably. A GaaS has to be a small production: if it works it's a goldmine and if it doesn't work it's just a small investment that went wrong. Definitely it's not worth making an AAA GaaS these days.

On top of that they are probably resizing the VR department: London studio -I think- was responsible for the tools for VR games, probably they are happy with what they got. Despite what Zuckerbeck thinks, VR will never be mainstream in the short run, it's just a gimmick too complicated and too limited to appeal the big market. For Sony is really a small niche, just a side project where it's not worth spending too much money. As a PSVR2 user I kinda like the fact that the headset is mostly used to enhance experiences of normal games (like GT7 o RE 4, 8), but this makes the VR and accessory more than a real platform so it's really something that doesn't require big investments.

Having said that that's just disgusting, going to party just 5 days before shutting the studio out of the blue is a disgrace.

This underline, once again, how stupid is fanboyism and console war: they are all greedy mother**** that only care about making money.

"Twisted Metal live-service"

I read as "Twisted metal" aw yeah... "live-service" ...never mind.

And still no crossplay. Sony so dense, light bends around it.

They still think Destiny 2 is their holy grail.

At least this means an even shorter window to please the Master Race.

You are forgiven Sony, carry on.

surprised playstation is cutting rather than investing in more great gaming experiences

Told you so few days ago.
What makes this even more disgusting is that Jim LyingRyan visited the London Studio about a week ago,made selfies with them and was "playing" happy Sony family!

Not a lot of money in hardware sales so outselling the competition 2 to 1 isn't much good unless there are a lot of great games to sell licensing fees for, or copies of, if you own that game. Last year was a pretty slow year for 1st and 3rd party games and this year seems to be looking like its going to be an even worse year. Games being cancelled all over the place is not a good sign. Sony getting goofy over live service games isn't helping either. They're known for their stellar, story driven RPGs and those seem to be a long way off. Games are getting more and more expensive to make but the quality of the games doesn't seem to be matching the cost of production. The industry needs to get back to making games with solid gameplay and a good story rather than worrying more about eye candy than anything else and then spending $500 million in advertising to try and sell their polished turd. When you have to bring in teams from half a dozen studios to help with one game, you are doing it wrong. Oh, and while you're at it, stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince developers/publishers to strip a small piece of every game made to give to PS owners as bonus DLC. People are already buying your console faster than you can makes it. You don't need to throw money away to convince them to do what they are already doing.

With all the censorship policies and questionable agendas and writing choices, lately Sony have been very much of touch with their own fanbase.

Probably from all the "live service" games that got planned a few years back. Hopefully majority never see the light of day.

Assuming one would be as big as Fortnite was always a stupid idea. Fortnite didn't even know it would be as big as Fortnite.

I still find it funny as hell that the "fastest growing industry in the world (Software)" is also getting mass layoffs every time the Rooster calls in the morning.

Shame for those loosing their jobs.

Considering Xbox has more games in development than both Ninty and ps combined, yep… let that sink in, the fact that sony is canceling games too is not good at all.

They have zero 1st party until April next year. That’s a longer drought than what Xbox had. Oh well there’s always HiFi Rush, Sea of Thieves etc. I suppose.

But ps gamers don’t buy games right?

Here’s some stats,

1 in 20 ps gamers purchased Helldivers 2. That’s pretty woeful.

And 1/4 of all Helldivers 2 players are on ps and it used to be 1/5. The vast majority are on pc. But we kinda knew already that most ps gamers don’t buy many games apart from COD, FIFA, Madden etc. etc.

AI will save the industry, we'll go back to the 90s where small teams make the AAA games again. Game engines like Unreal will be able to do most of the heavy lifting and that is sort of happening already.

They're obviously ditching VR and that is why PSVR2 is getting PC support, they will end of life the hardware and looking at those developers they're mainly studios that have done VR games.