The closure of London Studio and the dismissal of 900 employees across all PlayStation Studios, in particular Firesprite, Guerrilla, Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, the teams of the Technology, Creative and Support divisions, cannot be defined as a bolt from the blue, but they arrived after numerous warnings that in the In recent years something hasn't gone as it should have with PlayStation's business.
Despite appearing top of the class, the house of PS5 right now he is a giant with feet of clay and this is only the first step towards a restructuring that will probably be deeper than you think, especially if there isn't a turning point.
A systemic crisis
The latest financial results have told us: PlayStation produces enormous revenues for Sony, but the profits are so low that they have created such a balance that the slightest error could turn into losses.
The reasons are known: skyrocketing development costs, development cycles stretched out of all proportion, enormous infrastructure maintenance costs, PS5 sales lower than estimates, as well as many errors from a management point of view, with the latest choices made by Jim Ryan which have left real chasms in various areas. In short, PlayStation currently appears stable because it comes from an extremely prosperous period PS4but the new management has to face many critical issues that risk causing great damage if left to fester.
London Studio is only the first sacrifice on the altar of shareholders. When Totoki spoke in his latest financial statement about a company that doesn't know how to make money from what it produces, he wasn't just making a joke, but he was telling his main contacts that he would act as soon as possible to remedy the situation. situation and make their money work better and so it was. The next one to risk big is Bungie, considering the words spoken by Totoki on the same occasion.
London Studio was demolished not for particular faults, but only because it was employed for years in the weakest sector of PlayStation, the VR one, and is now working on a live service in a moment of rethinking Ryan's choice to bet everything on this model . Furthermore, the software house's headquarters were in a particularly expensive country in terms of management costs. In short, London Studio was simply weak and weak in times of crisis…
The problem is that many fail to perceive the gravity of certain statements when they are made in public. The president of a company doesn't make jokes just for the sake of making jokes. When he says something in the face of negative announcements, he is implicitly communicating something else. Furthermore, thinking that changes in direction do not lead to sacrifices is naive, because they are admissions of the failure of a certain strategy and as such require the lamb to bleed on the altar to satisfy those who had believed in the strategy put aside investing money in it. If he had not acted, he would have been perceived as weak.
It's a shame that in all of this the PlayStation ecosystem is weakened, losing another important piece.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial team and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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