Layoffs have hit another PlayStation studio, though it is not a game development team but a software development team. The news was reported by Oscar Diaz, Senior Design Technologist at PlayStation since October 2020, where he worked on ‘Building tools and processes that help the UX group at PlayStation push the boundaries of play.’ Diaz, one of the affected employees, wrote on Mastodon:
Most of my team was just laid off from PlayStation. It was a dream to get to work with Sony on the platform I’d grown up playing since the PS1 and contribute to the PS5, Portal, PSVR2, PS App, and future consoles. If you know anyone who needs an engineer experienced with native console UI, feel free to reach out.
Sony’s PlayStation division has recently laid off several employees, including some at Sony Bend following the cancellation of their live service project (which got canceled alongside a God of War live service game in development at Bluepoint). A few months ago, we reported on the closures of Firewalk, maker of the live service Concord game, and Neon Koi, which was going to port PlayStation franchises to mobile devices. Earlier in 2024, around a year ago, PlayStation cut 8% of its total workforce, shutting down the London studio and even laying off employees at acclaimed studios like Guerrilla Games, Naughty Dog, and Insomniac Games. In July 2024, PlayStation subsidiary Bungie laid off 220 employees, too.
Of course, this is far from a PlayStation-specific issue. 2024 was terrible across the whole industry, and 2025 isn’t shaping up to be any better. Layoffs hit Reflector Entertainment after the failure of Unknown 9: Awakening, and the same goes for Phoenix Labs, developer of Dauntless and Fae Farm, which had to let go of most of the studio. BioWare was shrunk down to less than a hundred employees following the commercial underperformance of Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Ubisoft laid off 185 employees, including the shutdown of the Leamington studio.
