Sony PlayStation Unit to Lay Off 900 Employees and Close London Studio
(Reuters) – Japan’s Sony will cut around 900 jobs at its PlayStation unit and close a studio in London, it said on Tuesday, as the video game industry tries to recover from a post-pandemic slump.
The layoffs affect about eight percent of the division’s staff in regions from the Americas to Asia and come days after Sony cut annual sales expectations for its PlayStation 5 console.
“We’ve come to the conclusion that tough decisions have become inevitable,” said Sony’s head of gaming, Jim Ryan, blaming it for changes in the way the video game industry develops, distributes and launches products. Ryan will retire in March.
The move aligns Sony with the likes of Microsoft and Tencent-owned Riot Games, which have also laid off thousands of workers in recent months amid a slow recovery in the gaming market.
The global video game market grew just 0.6% to $184 billion last year, according to industry tracker Newzoo, though that was better than a more than 5% drop in 2022.
The layoffs also affect other Sony studios, including U.S.-based Insomniac Games, which worked on games such as “Marvel’s Spider-Man 2,” and Naughty Dog, the studio behind The Last of Us.
Sony had said earlier this month that it expects a gradual decline in PlayStation 5 unit sales starting next fiscal year, and that it does not plan to release major franchise games in the upcoming fiscal year.
Lifetime sales of the device have increased by more than 50 million units since its launch in late 2020, after a few slow early years, when the supply shortage caused by the pandemic limited the entertainment conglomerate’s device production.
