Chris Deering, the former president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE), has pushed back against the idea of the industry’s widespread layoffs being caused by corporate greed.
On a recent episode of Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, Deering shared his thoughts on the last two years of staff cuts and studio closures. Citing Sony London (which shut down in May), he noted that “if money isn’t coming in from consumers on the last game, it’s going to be hard justifying spending money for the next.”
Layoffs in the game industry
Since the start of 2023, there have been at least two rounds of layoffs per week at studios of varying sizes. At time of writing, there have been 11,540 estimated layoffs for 2024, and a combined 22,040 cuts between 2023 and now.
In February, Sony laid off 900 PlayStation developers across various first-party studios and canceled multiple projects to keep room for “future growth.” More recently, it scrapped Firewalk’s Concord just two weeks post-launch.
Despite how things have gone, Deering believes game development “[won’t be] a lifetime of poverty or limitation. It’s still where the action is. These things do recover sometimes a lot faster than you might think, when all is very precarious.”
Deering further likened the situation to the pandemic, and said developers will have to “figure out how to get through it” before their “[presumably] decent” severance package runs out.
His advice? Keep up with industry news and “drive an Uber, or go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”
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