Insomniac’s internal breach is truly the gift that keeps on giving for this holiday season, and as it turns out it’s not financially viable for Sony to waste upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars in developmental costs to earn back measly figures in the tens of millions.
In yet another finding within the numerous leaked documents, Sony is planning internal cutbacks, involving employee layoffs and the potential closure of one of its own studios. The document references a meeting on November 9, during which Sony management instructed the dismissal of 50 to 75 individuals from Insomniac Games, despite their success and other studios under the Sony label.
Insomniac Games are under immense pressure by Sony it would seem, given how their latest release, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 costing upwards of $300 million dollars to produce according to a 2020 projection, the actual profits generated from the games success is immensely miniscule by comparison.
To put it into perspective, Spider-Man 2 is a shallow copy and paste rendition of the first game that doubles down on progressive themes and nonsensical “stealth” sections that turn Mary Jane into a Mary Sue.
The original Spider-Man release from 2018 apparently costed around $100 Million dollars, so its sequel which is no different to play with progressive nonsense splattered around with a uninteresting story that pins Peter Parker as an incompetent idiot, cost three times as much.
In the beginning of the year, the studio had anticipated surpassing 500 employees. However, in September, Sony issued a directive capping the headcount at 470 people. Subsequent documents from November indicate that Insomniac is considering a strategic reduction of 50-75 people.
A proposal to “slim down” a forthcoming Ratchet & Clank game and a new intellectual property was turned down. Instead, Insomniac leadership stated that cuts would have to be made from the larger Wolverine and Spider-Man teams, with some personnel from the Ratchet and new IP teams being utilized to fill the gaps.
Interestingly, amid discussions of cost-cutting, Insomniac notes that other teams within the PlayStation umbrella are also feeling the impact, and there is a mention of “one studio closure.” Whether this prediction materializes is yet to be determined.
The rationale behind Sony’s need for these cuts is somewhat perplexing, given the success of the PS5 and many of their games from a financial point of view.
However, business decisions can be complex, we’ve seen Sony accidentally reveal the production costs for games such as Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us 2 cost upwards of $200 Million dollars, quite evidently it’s not feasible or tangible to continue making large-scale cinematic games with ballooning budgets that cost unbelievable amounts of money to produce just to make back meager sums as a return.
Sony quite literally has to sell tens of millions of copies of their first-party games to recuperate the costs associated with their development, hence their enlarged focus on porting their games over onto the PC market for additional revenue collection, recently we’ve seen Sony outright cancel the Last of Us Online project probably due to the incompetence in producing an action-focused online game by Naughty Dog as they have been utterly raped by the drug of movie-like cinematic marvels.
Sony recently axed countless employees from its Visual Arts team earlier in the year, combined with another ~100 or so from Bungie being let go, about that studio closure it’s likely that the victim specifically would be Media Molecule but I wouldn’t be all that surprised to see that Sony gives Japan one last middle finger by closing Team Asobi outright.
