The teams that worked on Uncharted, Concord, and The Last of Us are under the attack of layoffs at Sony. The situation is not better for the creators of Until Dawn.
Even though Sony has many successful single-player game projects, it has not succeeded with «live services». Concord became one of the company’s biggest failures, so Sony is revising many of its plans after the fiasco. Currently, the changes concern the teams that worked on multiplayer games.
PlayStation Visual Arts and PS Studios Malaysia, as well as the independent studio Ballistic Moon, have been affected by the layoffs. These massive layoffs were the second after the case of 2024 when about 900 employees left the company.
It is not known how many developers have been laid off so far. Employees of both studios learned that March 7 would be their last working day. This was later confirmed on LinkedIn. Former head of the Visual Arts project Abby LeMaster wrote that developers with decades of experience had left the studio and called the situation a «hard blow».
«PSVA has laid off developers with decades of experience in the industry: talent that will be extremely difficult to replace. This industry can be unpredictable, but the skills, experience, and passion of the people I worked with at PSVA are undeniable», LeMaster wrote.
Visual Arts helped major PlayStation developers with graphics and technical content of their games. The studio has worked on such franchises as Uncharted and The Last of Us. They are also worked on Bend Studio in the God of War universe, but after it was canceled, they also felt liberated in 2023.
At the same time, PS Studios Malaysia, a support studio that helped with projects such as Concord and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered. Its senior manager, Johann Affendi Mahfour, confirmed that there was also a «wave» of layoffs there.
The situation with Ballistic Moon is even worse, as it is an independent studio and after the launch of Until Dawn Remake was unable to find funding or a publisher for new projects. There were talks with Sony about another game or support for Until Dawn updates, but this never happened. Today, only the owners and perhaps a few employees work at the studio. The rest of the team was laid off.
«People share bugs they find in the game to let the team know, but no one else is working on maintaining patches for the game The studio is actually closed», — said one source.
For its part, Sony has not yet commented on the situation, so we have to wait for official statements. But it seems that the era of live-service experiments for PlayStation is gradually coming to an end. Overall, the situation in the industry does not look optimistic. In 2023, more than 10,000 developers were laid off. In 2024, this figure has already increased to 14,000. Many companies do not disclose the exact number of layoffs, but it is clear that the trend continues.
Source: Insider Gaming / Neowin
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