PlayStation Downsizing Continues: Another Round of Layoffs

In February of 2024, Sony announced widespread layoffs of approximately 900 PlayStation employees, which accounted for some 8 percent of the gaming giant's employee base at the time. Towards the end of the year, Sony closed up mobile game developer Neon Koi and Concord-based developer Firewalk Studios, and in January 2025, the company canceled two first-party PlayStation live-service titles in development.

Although Sony has assured these studios are safe from closure, it seems that the game cancellations might have had an unwelcome ripple effect on PlayStation's support teams. Sony reduced an unspecified but reportedly substantial number of jobs in the PlayStation division. The layoffs are reported to be concentrated among PlayStation's Visual Arts Group and Malaysia Studio, both of which are support operations assisting the brand's core game development studios.

Abby LeMaster, a former project manager for PlayStation Visual Arts, took to LinkedIn on Monday and announced that several developers at the San Diego-based support studio lost their employment that day. LeMaster stated that the layoffs "hit hard", reportedly letting go of developers with "decades" of experience and skill that will be "extraordinarily difficult to recoup".

A different recent report from Kotaku also closely investigated the PlayStation Visual Arts layoffs, accusing them of being "widespread" and including some of the developers impacted by recently canceled titles like Bend Studios' live-service game. But Visual Arts job cuts apparently went on longer than that, likely indicating a wider downsizing program.

Unfortunately, this does not end there, as PlayStation's Studio Malaysia support group, which was established in 2020, has also been caught up in the latest round of mass layoffs. PlayStation Studio Malaysia senior project manager Johann Mahfoor recently confirmed on LinkedIn that he too was one of the staff laid off, calling it a "mass workforce reduction" affecting both Malaysia and other global PlayStation teams.

Speculation had risen that Studio Malaysia was helping out Bluepoint on its now-shelved game, and perhaps that's the reason why the support team found themselves included in the recent mass layoffs. 2024 proved to be an extremely challenging year for the video games industry, with over 14,500 studio and publisher redundancies worldwide. When the redundancies for 2022 and 2023 were combined, the combined figure totaled over 33,500 jobs lost within just three years.

The chief reason for the brutal spike in layoffs over recent years is a readjustment of monetary anticipations after the pandemic boom, during which consumer spending skyrocketed, and companies incorrectly anticipated the trend continuing in subsequent years. Sadly, it seems like the trend for layoffs might really continue in 2025 as well, as industry giants like Warner Bros. Games have recently shut down three studios.