PlayStation's Bend Studio Lays Off 30% of Staff - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 10 June 2025 / 4,796 Views
Sony Interactive Entertainment's Bend Studio has laid off 30 percent of staff today, according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier. This would be around 40 people let go.
Bend Studio recently cancelled a live service game and most recently released Days Gone for the PlayStation 4 in April 2019, for PC in May 2021, and for the PlayStation 5 in April 2025.
"Sony's Bend studio, which canceled a live-service game earlier this year, is laying off 30% of staff today (around 40 people), Bloomberg News has learned," said Schreier. "The studio has been spinning up a new project following the cancellation."
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 follow the author on Bluesky.
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Sony's live service ambitions have led to 8 cancellations, 3 studio closures (1 of them being partnered) and their studios are still suffering layoffs because of those ambitions.
It sucks seeing how this has played out. A couple of great wins like Helldivers 2 and the upcoming Marvel Tokon, but talk about hard to overlook how much wasted time and resources has been spent. Not very optimistic about the likes of Bungie with Marathon and Haven with Fairgames in the future either.
Hopefully with Bend now being a smaller team, they can now focus on their core strengths. I personally would love to see another spin-off based on a Sony IP again from them. If not a Days Gone 2. Would be a happy with a new IP though!
Nobody forced Bend to pitch a service game and we always long knew that at no point did playstation ever decrease funding for single player projects. They only increased funindg for multiplayer over what they had before. Just some studio head though that likely meant that it was easier to get a multiplayer game greenlit.
Pretty sure Jim Ryan did when he said in 2022 they were planning on releasing 12 live service games by 2026. Majority are now for sure never seeing the light of day. Unless Jim reached out to all of their studios asking for volunteers and Bend management raises their hand to be one of the 12 lol.
Just because single player funding was never decreased doesn’t mean it was necessarily used in the same capacity as it previously was.
The Days Gone 2 pitch that got rejected was for a fully co-op shared world game, so they were already leaning in that direction in 2019.
The days gone 2 pitch was a fully co-op shared world game, not a single player game
Even if that were true (pretty sure I saw a pp-slide from their financials saying otherwise - slight decrease), they could have invested so much more into single player. How many games on the level of GoW or TLoU could they have made with those bungie-billions, now burning for shiz and giggles? How many quality single player games, games their playerbase wants, if they did not foolishly invest into Haven or Concorde?
I am just saying my discontent goes deeper than "the number did not decrease". They bungled their whole generation with this nonsense.
Devs Gone.
Wait Sony bend no longer is wasting their talents on jim's live service game obsession? Holy shit this is actually good news!
Sad to see their stupid greed costing employees their jobs.
Now please make Bubsy 3D 2.
I'm sick of live service games taking priority
Wow stupid Sony forcing them to make a project and then punishes them for their own stupidity
Sony has to make up for their own mistakes and lay off themselves
I swear he was going to blame the chuds, lol.
