Despite the nematic “success” of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 managing over 2 Million copies sold in the first 24 hours alone, it would seem that single player focused first party releases with massive budgets ranging into the hundreds of millions of dollars haven’t been all that profitable for Sony.
Numerous employees have taken to social media to announce that they’ve been let go from their former positions.
Among the individuals who have been laid off is Daniel Bellemere, a senior level designer, who took to LinkedIn to announce his departure. Bellemere was involved in an undisclosed project and is situated in San Diego. However, it remains unclear whether he was affiliated with the Visual Arts Group or Sony San Diego directly.
Matt Barney has also disclosed his departure from Sony as has rigging artist Sean Teo, known for his work on The Last of Us Part 1. Both of them shared the following statements on social media:
Other first party Sony studios, such as Media Molecule are also on the chopping block, with the former Little Big Planet developers suffering job losses to the tune of 20 employees, effectively dropping their headcount from 135 to just 115.
However this massive round of layoffs across the board for Sony’s first party studios isn’t only reserved to easily replaceable shit kickers / developers, it extends far beyond that as Connie Booth, the current senior vice-president of PlayStation’s “internal production” will be leaving the company after a tenure of 27 years working at Sony.
The reasoning behind these layoffs is quite evident, with the company seemingly failing to produce a significant quantity of first party “exclusive” titles for the PlayStation 5 console over the three years it has been on the market, for those games that Sony have managed to produce they have all been disasters in terms of their actual development budget costs.
Blunders when it came to redacting confidential information regarding the whole court proceedings with Microsoft buying out Activision accidentally revealed that first party titles such as Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 costed the blue giant somewhere around ~$220 Million USD in terms of developmental budget and marketing.
It was also highly speculated that 2022’s God of War Ragnarok also cost roughly that same figure, while Horizon Forbidden West had managed to blow through ~$212 Million USD.
Considering the nature and scale of these games, their lack of online component of which to constantly pray upon consumers and their wallets with microtransactional content, despite garnering millions upon millions of copies sold, with budgets ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the likes of Sony would barely be breaking even or potentially even losing money despite these games selling ~10 million copies each.
It makes perfect sense why Sony are changing direction entirely, relying more so upon remasters, with The Last of Us Part 2, a game that was a receptive failure, allegedly being touted as having a potential remake in the works, never mind how both Naughty Dog and Guerrilla are working on multiplayer spinoffs of TLOU and Horizon.
These big budget “first party” titles are seemingly taking longer to produce, costing much more money, the end result being 20 hour long cutscene simulators with realistic motion captured animations, with budgets exceeding hundreds of millions they producing lesser and lesser profits for Sony which is why they now focus on pushing their games onto the PC market seemingly faster with each new release.
Sony are just purging some of its dead weight from its underperforming studios of assistant workers, with Media Molecule producing absolutely nothing of worth for several years at this point.
