Rumor: PlayStation Planning More Layoffs, Including at Insomniac - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 January 2024 / 8,464 Views
Sony might be looking to cut more staff at multiple PlayStation studios, including Insomniac Games, according to reports by Insider Gaming and Kotaku.
The information comes from documents obtained in the recent leak that also claims Sony could be looking to close one PlayStation studio as "one studio closure" is mentioned. It isn't known what studio this could be.
The reports claim Sony is looking to layoff 50 to 75 people at Insomniac Games with more layoffs across first-party PlayStation studios. The documents state "slimming down Ratchet and cutting new IP" wouldn't be enough to achieve Sony's goal.
"To remove 50-75 people strategically, our best option is to cut deeply into Wolverine and Spider-Man 3, replacing lower performers with team members from Ratchet and new IP," said Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price in a note.
While this information is from leaked documents it should be treated as a rumor and it is possible Sony's plans could have changed.
The video game industry has seen an estimated 9,000 employees laid off in 2023 alone.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This really looks bad coming from Sony's most successful and efficient studio, currently.
agreed, to sony its all about the $$$
I'm sure you couldn't just save money by having some of the top brass take some pay cuts instead. No, totally not an option.
Hopefully this will not end up being the case. 2023 has already been an awful year for game developers.
thank you team for all the hard work, we made piles of cash here. as a bonus you are no longer needed, terminated.
Why the fuck would you fire people from your most profitable studio by far. These people cost like 10 million per year and since most of the games Insomniac make are solid gold and very quickly compared to others, I don't see why firing 15% of Insomniac is a good idea.
It might be because of unsustainable development costs. For a start those Marvel Licensing Fees are costing a lot, for Miles Morales total dev cost was $285m and of that $106.5m went to Marvel. Net sales $554m and profits were $269m. Spider-Man 2 total dev cost is $315m, with a budget like that it needs to be doing a lot better than it has been.
Spider-Man 1 dev cost was just $90m and that sold 9m in a little over 2 months, SM2 has sold 6m in a little under 1 month, it is likely falling behind SM1. Then there's projected budgets for Wolverine & Spider Man 3 which are supposedly going to cost $305 & $385 respectively, which is insane. With massively increasing budgets if these games don't perform exceptionally well then it isn't lucrative for Sony to go down this path and sadly that may be why Sony are willing to lay off staff and downscale projects.
Pathetic of disney/marvel greed, no surprise really.
They love fooking up other business, remind me of micro$oft...
They’re the lambs. All “hard choices” made by executives are performances for the benefit of the board of directors to make it appear like they’re able to “make the hard choices!” It’s often irrelevant as to whether or not those hard choices actually benefit the company. Typically at the expense of those who actually work there.
Yikes. Insomniac have been doing wonders these last 5 years so to "cut deeply" into their major teams seems like an awful choice. That being said it is probably too ambitious for them to do 4 games at once which it sounds like, restructuring those projects might make sense.
Sounds like Shawn Layden had a point.
Nearly 400mill for Spider Man 3 and Wolverine!? That's together right?
not surpsied by this yearly tradition
Considering how dominating the Playstation 5 has been, this is sad to see.
Insomniac has made some brilliant games, so would hate to see the developer gutted.
Shouldn't really be a question of profit for shareholders in this equation, with Microsoft owning Activision+Blizzard, Sony needs to keep it's advantage.
Seems to me that in this case rather the usual cycle of game by game let go of all contracted staff once their game contracts end in this case from ratchet and clank, a system where you can lose not just average but also good workers, they decided instead of just letting them all go regardless of merit to match their performance against similar workers in the rest of the workforce when deciding who to keep and go.
Whoever was in charge of keeping their data safe should probably be let go. Insomniac has too many projects in the cooker to layoff too many employees.
Jim Ryans retirement party costs had to come from somewhere. Fucking corp bullshit.
It's going to take even longer time to develop games with all these layoffs going on
