Ghost of Yotei Developer Sucker Punch Hit With Layoffs - News
by William D'Angelo , posted 5 hours ago / 1,076 Views
Ghost of Yotei developer Sucker Punch Productions has been hit with layoffs. A former employees told Aftermath 26 employees have been laid off.
An email Sucker Punch sent to staff reads, "After carefully observing the challenges in the market and reviewing the team needs for our next project, we've decided to make some staffing reductions. Several positions across Sucker Punch will be eliminated as a result.
"We know this is a lot to take in, and we want to assure you that we did not make this decision lightly. We have given this a lot of attention and worked to support our affected colleagues during this transition as well as we can. … There's no getting around that this is a hard day. Next week we will go into more details about the future."
Ghost of Yotei released for the PlayStation 5 in October 2025.
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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-game costs a fifth of what wolverine did
-pretty successful
-fire people anyway
Thanks sony please keep never missing
....ooof its like they been (wait for it) sucker punched
Translation, we think AI can replace these people (probably at double the costs, tokens cost a shit ton of money). So we thought let's fire them.
Is around 10-20% of the total team size.
looks like no one is safe!
The game did not make enough money then. How about just cap budgets and stop with the visual increases, jeez.
It cost $60m and made like $400m+. So, something else is the case here. Replaced by AI or the new game will not require certain staff that were necessary in the past.
Sony are scumbags then.
Smells like a sequel or something similar enough if they expect to need less staff.
Nope, just Sony cost cutting and trying to compensate for their future hardware loses to appease shareholders
Profitability is no more of a job guarantee in this market than unprofitability.
Nooo! Yotei was so good too. Wtf is Sony doing?
Just finished the dlc today and come around to bad news, gaming is such a piece of shit nowdays.
Amazing game, can't recommend it enough.
Its a mistake to think that the games being profitable will save jobs going forward.
It's more about future costs.
This might also be an indicator that the next PlayStation has only relatively modest processing power improvements. If it was much more powerful, Sucker Punch would probably need more staff, not less.
Video discussing this news is now live - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y22jg7hjK0s
Kinda crazy they put out two AAA games with a combined budget of under 150 million and both were profitable. Makes you wonder what is even the point anymore.
