PlayStation: Sony to lay off 900 employees in latest gaming troubles
Sony will lay off 900 employees from PlayStation, the company has said.
Staff from across the world will lose their jobs, said PlayStation head Jim Ryan this week. It will reduce the division’s staff by around 900 people.
That will lead to cuts at several of PlayStation’s studios, including the complete closure of its London studio, which worked on several games for the PSVR virtual reality headset.
Mr Ryan and PlayStation did not say exactly why the cuts were being made. “The goal is to streamline our resources to ensure our continued success and ability to deliver experiences gamers and creators have come to expect from us,” he said in an email sent to staff, without giving specific details about what the changes will include.
The layoffs are just the latest in a series of cuts made across the gaming industry. Already more than 6,000 people have been laid off from gaming jobs this year, according to a website tracking those updates, after cuts at Microsoft, Unity and others.
The video game industry grew rapidly throughout the pandemic. That led to significant investment from companies including PlayStation, which struggled to make enough PS5 consoles for months after the platform was first launched.
Since 2022, however, gaming studios and other companies connected to the industry have announced a run of job losses.
PlayStation denied that the layoffs indicated any weakness in the business. Instead he suggested that the decision had been made “to continue to grow the business and develop the company”.
Mr Ryan told staff: “While these are challenging times, it is not indicative of a lack of strength of our company, our brand, or our industry. Our goal is to remain agile and adaptable and to continue to focus on delivering the best gaming experiences possible now and in the future.”
The update comes just a couple of weeks after PlayStation said that sales of its PS5 console had disappointed and that it was entering the “latter stages of its life”. Sales of the console would start falling from next year, Sony’s senior vice president, Naomi Matsuoka said after its recent results.
