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Insomniac Leak: Another PlayStation Studio Could Be Closing In The Future

Ronin_7

Ronin_7

Banned
Place your bets, sadly.

Business plans change, and Sony would not confirm if the discussed cuts are still on the table or already completed. But a notes file referencing a November 9 PlayStation off-site meeting reiterates the 50-75 number of cuts. The notes suggest the cuts are being asked of other PlayStation studios as well, including the line "there will be one studio closure." Sony did not respond when asked to clarify.

In an especially tough year for video game companies, Sony hasn't been immune. It closed Pixel Opus earlier this year, and Sackboy maker Media Molecule saw layoffs. Contractors were cut at The Last of Us studio Naughty Dog and PlayStation's Visual Arts studio suffered cuts as well. It's hard to tell if that's the extent of the damage or just the beginning. The hacked materials from Insomniac show leaders at a studio that's delivered hit after hit scrambling to arrive at a plan for the next five years so it can keep doing that.
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kotaku.com

What Hacked Files Tell Us About The Studio Behind Spider-Man 2

Internal documents show how a big PlayStation studio plans its future
kotaku.com kotaku.com
 
D

Darsxx82

Member
Let anyone who understood it better correct me, but my summary would be:
1-Sony meeting with Studios 9 November 2023??

2- Need to make job cuts or reduce cost throughout its different Studios.

3- Insomniac is responsible for cutting between 50-75 employees. His solution after the cut is to reduce the number of developers preparing the new Ratchet and Spiderman 3 and take them to the priority project now, which would be Wolverine.

4- This process of job cuts/reducing costs among the Studios requires the closure of one of them.

The article is quite confusing, but I think that's what basically comes out of it...
 
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SlimeGooGoo

SlimeGooGoo

Party Gooper
Punished Miku said:
Its weird how hard up they seem for cash right now. They're breaking records. I dont completely get it.
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What have you done to Yoshi-kun?

739167.jpg
 
thicc_girls_are_teh_best

thicc_girls_are_teh_best

Gold Member
BrunoCoel said:
Poor Nixxes.
Click to expand...

The only one I wouldn't mind. That's if they can't become a support studio for others.

Otherwise another L for a pretty rough end-of-year for SIE (news-wise). Also, FUK RHYSIDA!!
Punished Miku said:
Its weird how hard up they seem for cash right now. They're breaking records. I dont completely get it.
Click to expand...

Revenue != profits and console gaming, particularly hardware and AAA software (areas Sony/SIE specialize in) are seemingly thin margins. Seeing the $300+ million budgets for Spiderman 3 is not comforting.

Interestingly, Insomniac themselves had a graph in that leak talking about the benefits of AA/mid-sized games over AAA and I'm so glad they put it to text, assumedly presented to SIE. They're 100% right, and ceasing internal AA development was one of the biggest mistakes SIE made in the past 10 years IMO. More marketing and sensible transmedia pushes would've helped a lot of those games do even bigger numbers.

Woopah said:
The leaks show that Sony is asking for cost cutting across their studios and that 50-75 people at Insomniac will be let go.

As part of this cost cutting, one of their studios will be closed.
Click to expand...

Guessing it's the one that was developing the now-cancelled Spiderverse GaaS title.
 
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Mibu no ookami

Mibu no ookami

Member
Punished Miku said:
Its weird how hard up they seem for cash right now. They're breaking records. I dont completely get it.
Click to expand...

Let me break a few things down for you
  • PlayStation has historically run on small margins unlike Nintendo. You wouldn't know that they were market leader if you only looked at their margins as opposed to their revenue or sales
  • PlayStation just spent a ton of cash for Bungie
  • The next couple of years will probably be significantly more lean than most people expect
  • Sony is looking at growing as quickly as it can
    • To sustain that growth you need to ensure you have steady cash flow, which can require maximizing operating income
    • Sony is looking to purchase studios or publishers and that is going to weigh down their operating costs as it is
You have to ask yourself does it make sense to pay for an expensive recruiting team when you're not actively hiring internally? Does it pay to have a legal department at Bungie if SIE Legal can handle things? Same with HR. Maybe you have a local HR representative, but the rest can be farmed out to a central HQ. Same with QA. Each studio has its own QA and while they do work year round not just when projects are nearly complete, there are ineffiencies when you have staff who aren't actively working on a project. It's better to have a central or outsources QA that you bill based on specific project work.

As for the studio that would be closed, Media Molecule is the most likely, but Sony Bend is a possibility too. I think they're probably relatively cheap given their location compared to some of the more expensive studios like Santa Monica, but they haven't announced a game and their last game came out in 2019.

London Studio is also a prime suspect.

Firesprite might be a surprise as well. They were just bought, which will likely buy them a bit of time. Sony did shutter BigBig within 5 years, so keep that in mind.
 
StreetsofBeige

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Punished Miku said:
Its weird how hard up they seem for cash right now. They're breaking records. I dont completely get it.
Click to expand...
The games division makes around $2B profit per year and the whole company is somewhere around $10B I think. They are doing fine. It only looks bad if compared to the stay at home hoarding covid years where tech companies and grocery stores kicked ass. I think Sony made $12B and Gaming Division made $3B years back. My company is no different. It's 2023 and we havent grown at all since 2020. Any new products and price increases weve done lately just gets us up to jackpot covid 2020 where we couldnt stay in stock. We could had had zero account managers and in 2020 still get record sales.

But the key thing for Sony since PS4 took off with sales and profits around 2016-17 is that it's become their most important pillar for sales and profits. Bigger than movies and music. Bigger than TVs and stereos.

So the company's biggest growth targets hinge on Playstation. Thats why they amped up sub fees and are trying to squeeze out as much PC port sales and even multiplat MLB games on Nintendo and Xbox. Every dollar helps.

Xbox on the other hand for MS is such a negligble effect on sales and profits, it barely gets mentioned and lumped into that small pillar dealing with Surface laptops and other consumer stuff. Peanuts compared to growing sales and profits anchored by huge money from cloud and traditional productivity software, Windows divisions.
 
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Thirty7ven

Thirty7ven

Banned
StreetsofBeige said:
The games division makes around $2B profit per year and the whole company is somewhere around $10B I think. They are doing fine. It only looks bad if compared to the stay at home hoarding covid years where tech companies and grocery stores kicked ass. I think Sony made $12B and Gaming Division made $3B years back. My company is no different. It's 2023 and we havent grown at all since 2020. Any new products and price increases weve done lately just gets us up to jackpot covid 2020 where we couldnt stay in stock. We could had had zero account managers and in 2020 still get record sales.

But the key thing for Sony since PS4 took off with sales and profits around 2016-17 is that it's become their most important pillar for sales and profits. Bigger than movies and music. Bigger than TVs and stereos.

So the company's biggest growth targets hinge on Playstation. Thats why they amped up sub fees and are trying to squeeze out as much PC port sales and even multiplat MLB games on Nintendo and Xbox. Every dollar helps.

Xbox on the other hand for MS is such a negligble effect on sales and profits, it barely gets mentioned and lumped into that small pillar dealing with Surface laptops and other consumer stuff. Peanuts compared to growing sales and profits anchored by huge money from cloud and traditional productivity software, Windows divisions.
Click to expand...

You guys are broken records with this Ms is rich shit.

The only reason MS isn’t worried about Xbox profits right now is because Xbox has to grow, which is why they are spending 80 billion growing the division. If Xbox becomes the more dominant player like PlayStation, then they will start worrying really hard about profits because contrary to what some of you looneys believe, MS isn’t running a charity with the Xbox.
 
StreetsofBeige

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Thirty7ven said:
You guys are broken records with this Ms is rich shit.

The only reason MS isn’t worried about Xbox profits right now is because Xbox has to grow, which is why they are spending 80 billion growing the division. If Xbox becomes the more dominant player like PlayStation, then they will start worrying really hard about profits because contrary to what some of you looneys believe, MS isn’t running a charity with the Xbox.
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Xbox has been around for over 20 years. Everyone claims theyve made bad money, or even lost money on Xbox for two decades. Yet Xbox is still around.

Other products like Windows phones, Zune and any consumer product that didnt do well is long gone. But MS has actually been amping up gaming with new consoles, GP and buying big publishers.

If MS really cared about profits, Xbox would had been gone years ago.
 
Thirty7ven

Thirty7ven

Banned
StreetsofBeige said:
Xbox has been around for over 20 years. Everyone claims theyve made bad money, or even lost money on Xbox for two decades. Yet Xbox is still around.

Other products like Windows phones, Zune and any consumer product that didnt do well is long gone. But MS has actually been amping up gaming with new consoles, GP and buying big publishers.

If MS really cared about profits, Xbox would had been gone years ago.
Click to expand...

Damn you’re slow with this. They buy ABK for their profits, keep COD multiplat for its profits, Candy crush/mobile for its profits.

You talking all this shit as if you’ve been playing Spider-Man 2 sized games every year from Xbox studios. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

They are buying revenue and profits, so that they grow straight away and make more profits straight away. What’s hard about this? Jesus.

It’s this constant fantasy about MS being in gaming because they love making you happy and don’t mind losing money. Are you even real?
 
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StreetsofBeige

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Thirty7ven said:
Damn you’re slow with this. They buy ABK for their profits, keep COD multiplat for its profits, Candy crush/mobile for its profits.

You talking all this shit as if you’ve been playing Spider-Man 2 sized games every year from Xbox studios. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

They are buying revenue and profits, so that they grow straight away and make more profits straight away. What’s hard about this? Jesus.

It’s this constant fantasy about MS being in gaming because they love making you happy and don’t mind losing money. Are you even real?
Click to expand...
Relax. You're getting hyper.

Activision propping up gaming sales and profits. And thats a 2023 event, which finally got approved a couple months ago. so the effect is really 2024 and beyond.

If MS cared that much about Xbox's bad financials, why didnt they cut the cord anytime up to 2022?

As for the future profits of Activision (which is around $2B per year), well too bad. It's as much (if not a bit more) than Sony's entire gaming division. Thats a lot of profits to buy more publishers. :)
 
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bitbydeath

bitbydeath

Member
Might have just been about Pixel Opus, future doesn't mean our future, but whenever it was written future.
 
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LavitzSlambert

LavitzSlambert

Member
StreetsofBeige said:
The games division makes around $2B profit per year and the whole company is somewhere around $10B I think. They are doing fine. It only looks bad if compared to the stay at home hoarding covid years where tech companies and grocery stores kicked ass. I think Sony made $12B and Gaming Division made $3B years back. My company is no different. It's 2023 and we havent grown at all since 2020. Any new products and price increases weve done lately just gets us up to jackpot covid 2020 where we couldnt stay in stock. We could had had zero account managers and in 2020 still get record sales.

But the key thing for Sony since PS4 took off with sales and profits around 2016-17 is that it's become their most important pillar for sales and profits. Bigger than movies and music. Bigger than TVs and stereos.

So the company's biggest growth targets hinge on Playstation. Thats why they amped up sub fees and are trying to squeeze out as much PC port sales and even multiplat MLB games on Nintendo and Xbox. Every dollar helps.

Xbox on the other hand for MS is such a negligble effect on sales and profits, it barely gets mentioned and lumped into that small pillar dealing with Surface laptops and other consumer stuff. Peanuts compared to growing sales and profits anchored by huge money from cloud and traditional productivity software, Windows divisions.
Click to expand...

Shawn Layden saw the writing on the wall. AAA game development has become ridiculously expensive, first with the HD era and now with 4K open worlds being the expectation. Especially the kind of cinematic, story driven games Sony is known for creating. The models and animation, voice acting, mocap, holy shit - I can't imagine how much time and effort goes into creating the assets alone. Forget about play testing, changes/cut content, etc.

This is also why big games are so often criticized for being "soul-less". You don't have the ability to throw in some cool ideas or do major re-work when you are 3 years deep into a 5 or 6 year dev cycle. The era of cheap debt via low interest rate loans made it easy to just throw more money at a problem, but reality is setting in now and Sony is realizing that is not sustainable. The factors in the equation have changed.
 
StreetsofBeige

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
LavitzSlambert said:
Shawn Layden saw the writing on the wall. AAA game development has become ridiculously expensive, first with the HD era and now with 4K open worlds being the expectation. Especially the kind of cinematic, story driven games Sony is known for creating. The models and animation, voice acting, mocap, holy shit - I can't imagine how much time and effort goes into creating the assets alone. Forget about play testing, changes/cut content, etc.

This is also why big games are so often criticized for being "soul-less". You don't have the ability to throw in some cool ideas or do major re-work when you are 3 years deep into a 5 or 6 year dev cycle. The era of cheap debt via low interest rate loans made it easy to just throw more money at a problem, but reality is setting in now and Sony is realizing that is not sustainable. The factors in the equation have changed.
Click to expand...
well said.

Another problem games development faces. They always got to be bigger and bolder. Bigger games, more of this, more of that, more MP modes, more cut scenes, etc.... How often does a sequel get smaller and shorter?

It's an industry where quantity is heavily promoted. Look at all the games that brag feature set, length of game....... "our game is 3.5x bigger than the old game". Add it up and there's more costs.

At least for movies and tv shows, costs might go up for actors and production values, but TV shows are still 30-60 minutes long and most movies are roughly 2 hrs, where comedies and low budget stuff might be 90 minutes and the epic dramas and war battlers are closer to 2.5-3 hrs. Over time, it's kind of the same time slots. It's not like TV episodes are now 3 hrs long and movies are 6 hrs.
 
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LavitzSlambert

LavitzSlambert

Member
StreetsofBeige said:
well said.

Another problem games development faces. They always got to be bigger and bolder. Bigger games, more of this, more of that, more MP modes, more cut scenes, etc.... How often does a sequel get smaller and shorter?

It's an industry where quantity is heavily promoted. Look at all the games that brag feature set, length of game....... "our game is 3.5x bigger than the old game". Add it up and there's more costs.

At least for movies and tv shows, costs might go up for actors and production values, but TV shows are still 30-60 minutes long and most movies are roughly 2 hrs, where comedies and low budget stuff might be 90 minutes and the epic dramas and war battlers are closer to 2.5-3 hrs. Over time, it's kind of the same time slots. It's not like TV episodes are now 3 hrs long and movies are 6 hrs.
Click to expand...

I see your point, but I don't want to see gaming go in that direction like TV did where we get drip-fed one 8 episode, slow moving season every other year. The game industry kind of already tried that with Telltale's episodic content.

That is only good for the publishers financially - there is middle ground. With a few exceptions for their biggest franchises, Nintendo has seemed to figure out this middle ground development methodology years ago. Did it cause, or result from their HD transition woes? That I don't know, but they have committed to lower spec hardware and less bells and whistles in their games compared to their competitors and it seems they are better off for it.

Would I love the production quality of Sony's games in a Nintendo game? Sure. But is the end product that much better to justify the added cost? Doubtful, to me.
 
StreetsofBeige

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
LavitzSlambert said:
I see your point, but I don't want to see gaming go in that direction like TV did where we get drip-fed one 8 episode, slow moving season every other year. The game industry kind of already tried that with Telltale's episodic content.

That is only good for the publishers financially - there is middle ground. With a few exceptions for their biggest franchises, Nintendo has seemed to figure out this middle ground development methodology years ago. Did it cause, or result from their HD transition woes? That I don't know, but they have committed to lower spec hardware and less bells and whistles in their games compared to their competitors and it seems they are better off for it.

Would I love the production quality of Sony's games in a Nintendo game? Sure. But is the end product that much better to justify the added cost? Doubtful, to me.
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The plan with Spiderman 3 is to have two parts a year apart. So not spliced out int a ton of TV or Telltale episodes. So the master plan with SM3 is really one gigantic game split into two releases.

80EK7AK.jpg
 
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