It cost a lot of money to employ 20 people in California over the course of a decade. Its not a charity, they weren’t producing which is the main priority of a job
London Studios' Work in Progress from 2022 (Proposed closure of studio) Project is dead now!
- Thread starter Gamernyc78
- Start date
Rumored to be cancelled, something later was debunked by the CEO as happened with other games when he said the 12 were (back then) under development.
Some people was fired and pretty likely was delayed, which sounds like they had to made major changes, possibly a reboot of an important part of the game. Some people assumed it was cancelled but doesn't seem the case.
Well, they didn't even have their own office and were mostly folks that came directly from the university, that team pretty likely was super cheap. They were incubating them but didn't work out.
If Media Molecule was in California they probably would have been closed long ago.
Singstar was huge during the ps2 days, im surprised it never made it past that gen.
Pixelopus was Shawn Laydens pet project, lucky for them they got some great resume padding out of university
I still don't know why they didn’t do PS HOME 2/VR, especially for PSVR 2
Or carry on Singstar.
I dont know what these guys in charge are thinking half the time. Clearly outside of getting Kojima onboard for another new IP exclusive, Hermen has been a disaster.
But how far is he gonna take i though?
Im all for letting go of some of these studios if they are gonna bring in more.( Because except for Destruction All stars all the games are making money. Even Bend which I wasnt a big fan of Days Gone made money.)
And Im ok with them letting go some staff outside of the studios. Its a shame, but after working with some of these people, alot are not needed, like so many marketing and such.
Im not for the small vision of putting games day 1 on PC so they have a quick profit and bounce out with a bonus. These type of CEO’s dont care about PS in the long run
I also wonder why Dreams was never released on PC where it would have thrived
Sony invested in them, didn't produced anything for 4+ years. Shutdown was inevitable. Same can be applied for London Studio
I still think its a shame, because I enjoy alot of these smaller games. Japan Studios especially
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It's not just about the games that come out, it's also about the games that don't come out.
A canceled game isn't going to generate profit.
Games are entirely too expensive to have to cancel well into development. I think this is why Connie Booth is out. Greenlighting too many games that weren't viable.
I was expecting 10% cuts and he only did 8%. I think this was him being soft on the layoffs, but it's important to recognize that more cuts COULD come.
I don't expect 8% decrease in workforce to drastically impact game development that much. You have an entire studio closed that wasn't at all productive and you have other studios that probably ranged between 5-15% RIF.
That's not that dramatic if you consider churn. You've let go of a lot of community managers, an overabundance of writers, maybe an overabundance of artists. Where it will get more interesting is that they reduced their support staff, but fewer games mean you need fewer support staff.
tl;dr I think sony will be just fine and these cuts could have been way worse.
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Alot of talent in those devs and forward, innovative thinking that we lose when they get dismantled. I know most move on to other companies but still it's not the same.