Firesprite Games have spoken about layoffs, revealing PlayStation has failed to protect the studio’s employees from their toxic work culture.
Eurogamer revealed that they had started an investigation into the company’s woes when PlayStation made their announcement earlier this week. As such, it’s possible that some of those employees with grievances will be laid off, and not get their concerns addressed.
There is one immediate grievance to be addressed. Firesprite received assistance from another studio, XDev, to produce Horizon Call of the Mountain. It has now emerged that two staffers from XDev were accused of age discrimination and sexism by Firesprite employees.
Eurogamer uncovered a broader picture of neglect and mismanagement, that started when Sony acquired Firesprite. Firesprite Games itself was founded by former employees of Sony’s Studio Liverpool, who produced the PlayStation 4 pack-in title, The Playroom, and Run Sackboy Run. Sony’s acquisition of Firesprite in 2021 was taken as a positive, but it turns out, this was where problems began.
Under Sony, Firesprite saw changes in leadership, which then led to changes in the company culture. There are claims that the original leadership did not leave of their own accord, but these are not confirmed for now. Sony brought in people from XDev to take over those leadership positions at the studio.
Sony investigated the accusations against the two XDev staffers, who were put in positions of power in the company. They decided that the issues were from a misunderstanding and ended it there. Eurogamer stated that some of the employees were exploring legal options to address the issue.
Sony made more management mistakes than this, however. They consolidated several projects started before the acquisition, leaving middle management to address the fallout instead of giving them the help they needed to adjust.
Sony tried to hire specific people for Firesprite, by inventing specific job roles for them. And then, they suddenly instituted a hiring freeze, presumably because of changing economic conditions. This left Firesprite lacking in talent for those roles.
And, you won’t be surprised to learn that Firesprite crunched to deliver Horizon Call of the Mountain. What may surprise you is that Sony assigned more people to the project before requiring crunch. Theoretically, the issues with the work scaling up should have been addressed, but clearly Sony did not think it all through.
We should expect to learn more about the issues behind Firesprite Games in the weeks and months to come. But if this was waiting to emerge in the background, we may also learn about similar woes from even more studios in the future as well.
