The PlayStation-owned studio Visual Arts was hit with fresh layoffs this week amid a further restructuring of Sony’s U.S. game development operations. While some of the cuts included staff who had contributed to recently canceled projects like an upcoming live-service game at Bend Studio, a source told Kotaku the layoffs were more widespread than that.
Earlier this week, an unknown number of staff at the Visual Arts group based out of San Diego were informed that their last day at Sony would be March 7. The team provides internal art and technical support to first-party PlayStation studios and worked closely with Naughty Dog on the recent Last of Us Part 1 and 2 remasters among other projects.
Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It was tough waking up to messages that many friends and former coworkers from PSVA were laid off this morning,” former PSVA project manager Abby LeMaster, now at Riot Games, posted on LinkedIn on Monday. “The layoffs today hit hard. PSVA let go of developers with decades of subject matter expertise; talent that will be extraordinarily difficult to recoup. This industry can be unpredictable, but the skill, experience, and passion of the people I worked with at PSVA are undeniable.”
The layoffs come after an expensive failure in last year’s Concord, new rounds of live-service project cancellations including a reported God of War spin-off at BluePoint Games, and a reorganization within the top echelons of Sony leadership. In January, Hiroki Totoki became the company’s new CEO and Hideaki Nishino became the sole CEO of PlayStation, with Hermen Hulst, who had previously been co-CEO, reporting to him as the ongoing head of PlayStation Studios.
The latest cuts at the PlayStation Studios Visual Arts group follow an emerging trend of game companies pulling back development resources from expensive U.S.-based offices. Last year during a business briefing, Hulst said there had been “pressure on the cost side” as Sony laid off hundreds amid spiraling first-party blockbuster game development budgets.
“For every title, we have really rigorous review processes where we focus on the sustainability of our investments in these titles,” he said at the time. “We include areas such as looking at what can be outsourced, for example, to avoid too high peak resource on development teams because costs can be sticky. We’re looking at co-development options in areas where the costs per resource is maybe somewhat lower than the average or on the American west coast.”
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