Sony has recently laid off 900 staff. Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
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In another round of layoffs, this time at Sony, it’s again clear that big game budgets are the main factor at work.
With the ongoing and massive layoffs across the games industry right now, it seems to be developers that are bearing the brunt of this fiscal belt tightening.
However, the people that actually signed off on these unsustainable budgets are not the ones being laid off.
I talked a bit about this back when Microsoft laid off 1,900 staff last month, and that this situation was telegraphed way back in 2015.
Sadly, no-one listened or noticed the looming budgetary problem and here we are now, with the creative talent getting axed to cover for the management that drove them down this financial dead end in the first place.
At this point, I don’t know what will come of all this. I had hoped that those let go would be able to set up their own studios and survive that way, but it’s increasingly looking like most of these people will have nowhere to go.
That in itself is a tragedy and a far more worrying longterm loss to the industry than may be initially apparent.
In that, much of the expertise, experience and talent that propelled the games industry forward will be lost. The impact of that will be a slower rate of adaptation to new generations of gaming hardware and a reduction in functional innovation in the games we all play.
While it may look now that it’s just developers that are (unfairly!) paying the cost of a decade of financial mismanagement, it’s actually gamers that will suffer down the line too.
Unless the AAA focus is dropped entirely, games will become more formulaic and blander to keep up with the reduced amount of staff.
Considering that Ubisoft executives are pushing for “AAAA games”, it’s clear gaming could be in for a really disappointing period, with fewer staff crunching to reach increasingly unsustainable goals.
Naturally, my thoughts go out to all those affected in the past year of layoffs and it’s very sad to see Sony fall foul of this situation as well.
Put simply, the games industry needs a renaissance in how it is managed. Laying off developers at scale is not a sustainable solution to the situation the industry is now in.
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