PlayStation is laying off around 900 people across the world [Discussion]

Gediminas

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It's all a self fulfilling prophecy. Their vision for their console business sucks and it's time for PlayStation to be replaced.

Waiting them to turn their back on physical media before next gen, then they'll have made my decision for me.

Sad, that PlayStation is under such a shitty company, I wish they would PlayStation into it's own independent company that would not be under Sony.
When Playstation wasn't doomed in your book?
Fucking hell.
 
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Airbus

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30 Jun 2022
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AI impact start to take over ?

I mean AI can make you movie trailer by just typing a story right now




Lots of artist, special effect, programers, coders etc could lose their job by this
 

Kx11

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This seeming contradiction might be worth thinking about a little harder. Maybe calling PC competition isn't as deep as you think it is.

If Jimbo said "PC is our competition" he might be serious since PC market now include the portables like SteamDeck and the other ones and there are around 15 handhelds out there for PC gaming, my guess is that those handhelds are killing consoles slowly, Imagine carrying all your games including the ones from emulators with you all the time and you know they run as good as the actual home consoles hitting 60fps+ easy


I mean COD and Fifa fans? it's a no brainer
 

Dabaus

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My initial take away is I’m not surprised at all that London studio is getting closed. I wonder how media molecule was able to avoid being closed as well since dreams was a 10 year failure. Naughty dog makes sense since they wasted 4 years on a gaas game that went nowhere. Insomniac is the biggest head scratcher and doesn’t meant any sense to me.

I guess this means Sony isn’t acquiring any more studios and they better Hope Microsoft is done with those publisher acquisitions. At this point neither one should be buying anymore studios with how unsustainable everything is.
 

Nhomnhom

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If that's the case, they will lose clientele. Hopefully he will look at what was working until 2019 and just say "cool, this is what we need to do".
Based on history, I predict Sony will continue in this direction until they remove all the identity from their platform and if if the PS6 shows they lost a lot of momentum they'll probably blame it on the console market and players instead of holding themselves accountable.

When Playstation wasn't doomed in your book?
Fucking hell.
From 2009 until around the time Jim Ryan took over. My track record it pretty much perfect I knew Xbox was shit and going nowhere while most people here were probably still praising the Xbox 360.

We might still get a good wave of games to close this gen but that is going to be it. PlayStation completely lost it's identity and in 10 years it will be hard to tell SIE apart from EA, Activision or Ubisoft.

People here were saying PlayStation was going to buy SE, etc, and I was saying that they wouldn't buy shit and now they are laying off 8% of their workforce.
 

Satoru

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AI impact start to take over ?

I mean AI can make you movie trailer by just typing a story right now




Lots of artist, special effect etc could lose their job
What I'm loving about this AI push is that capitalism is doing what capitalism does: It looks at unlimited profit increases. When AI takes over every job, who the fuck is going to be working? This has not been considered, because they don't give two shits, they only care about next year's profit statement.
 

ethomaz

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Would be funny is Phil tweets "see we're not the only ones who laid off employees lol we can buy Sony cash in NASDAQ"


anyways, i wish all the best for the ones who worked on the PC ports only, the dude that printed the 8k logo on the box? not sorry for him tbh
If he enters in that weird comparison list he will lose anyway... proportionally PS layoffs are smaller than Xbox layoffs.
 

Mild Conviction

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13 Jan 2023
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AI impact start to take over ?

I mean AI can make you movie trailer by just typing a story right now




Lots of artist, special effect etc could lose their job
No, it's just good old fashioned greed powering these layoffs.

Besides, if AI could make a fully functional AAA game, it'd just be making very bad Assassin's Creed and Destiny clones, because that's the type of low effort slop prompters could muster.
 

Vertigo

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26 Jun 2022
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London studio closed? Didn’t even know they still had one. Was that the generically colorful co-op game that we saw art of only?
 
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Like my previous posts, this was driven by artificial inflation brought on by the pandemic. Nothing has shrunk, it was inflated during the pandemic and now we are seeing it contract.

And all the "Professionals" saying the console market has shrunk, it has not, its just not on the projected growth curve based of the artificially inflated numbers provided by the pandemic..... If anything its back on track.

If you looked at the data the head counts for all studios regardless of platform increased as the demand for digital media (games). Now that people can touch grass the demand has gone back to pre pandemic and those additional head counts are dead weight.

We never entered a golden era of gaming like these so called journalists, with fucking redicoulous quotes like:

"This drove a 20% boost in gaming sales globally and created nearly 20,000 jobs in 2020 alone. And it’s not expected to stop any time soon: According to research company IBISWorld"
Just like the housing market in the UK 2008 when the financial crisis hit and demands for housing went down, we are now seeing it in the gaming industry

some references:
 

Gediminas

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My initial take away is I’m not surprised at all that London studio is getting closed. I wonder how media molecule was able to avoid being closed as well since dreams was a 10 year failure. Naughty dog makes sense since they wasted 4 years on a gaas game that went nowhere. Insomniac is the biggest head scratcher and doesn’t meant any sense to me.

I guess this means Sony isn’t acquiring any more studios and they better Hope Microsoft is done with those publisher acquisitions. At this point neither one should be buying anymore studios with how unsustainable everything is.
Of course they aren't, they shared financials and said that they have close to 0 money to invest. People just ignores it.
 
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Satoru

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Lol at thinking they won’t be upping the porting efforts from this
I think this can go two ways:
  • They double down on their failed PC port strategy, which puts their best games in a competing platform
  • They stop their failed PC port strategy
One interesting coincidence is that Jim Ryan's "retiring" (firing) as announced on September 27, 2023, the same day HFW was announced for PC. This was, as far as I'm aware, the final PC port announced. TLOU2 Remaster was not announced for PC so far, which is weird considering PT1 was announced for PC at the same time as it was for PS5.

So my hope is that the strategy was stopped with Jim's firing, and that HFW is the last port since it was probably pretty much "ready" and the game had already stopped selling on consoles.

Also, HFW stopped selling on consoles because Jim thought it was a good idea to "test the waters" by having it on PS Plus, only for the results to be as expected: It fucked the games profitability and destroyed its sales.
 
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Kx11

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If he enters in that weird comparison list he will lose anyway... PS is bigger than Xbox and the layoff are half of Xbox.


He can enter with this comparison and would win so hard

"MS market cap is far bigger than Sony's, we can buy them cash"


Sony

MS


Sony is way smaller than MS/Xbox
 
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