Sony seems to have started a new round of layoffs for PlayStation, but not in the studios making games.
As posted in ResetERA by user Darkreaver, mastodon.gamedev.place user whoisryosuke made this post on the fediverse server:
“Most of my team was just laid off from PlayStation. It was a dream to get to work with Sony on the platform I’d grown up playing since the PS1 and contribute to the PS5, Portal, PSVR2, PS App, and future consoles. If you know anyone who needs an engineer experienced native console UI, feel free to reach out.”
To be clear, Ryosuke is an online handle, and their LinkedIn reveals their name as Oscar Diaz. It also reveals that they were a full time Senior Design Technologist at PlayStation since October 2020, describing their job as “Building tools and processes that help the UX group at PlayStation push the boundaries of play.”
Ryosuke also pinned this post on their fediverse account to describe what they do further:
“What’s up party people. I’m Ryosuke, I work at #PlayStation prototyping new experiences across console, #VR, and more. Before that I ran a #cannabis publication and studio for over 10 years.
I do a lot of OSS #webdev and #gamedev, mostly in #UI and tooling. I’m currently learning #Rust and #UnrealEngine, but I usually use #ReactJS and #JavaScript.
I’m also into art, fitness (#yoga and #bodybuilding), tv/film/anime, and probably more – feel free to ask!”
In fact, Ryosuke seems to be a real PlayStation fan outside of work. They also linked to their YouTube, where they have videos of hobbyist PlayStation projects, like designing a PS1 memory card made out of glass.
Darkreaver also found this comment from reddit moderator Zhukov-74 that may explain the situation further:
“For anyone who isn’t aware:
Sony Unifies Platform on EKS, achieving 5x Faster Deployments & 60% Lower Costs
Those “60% lower costs” probably in part refer to a decrease in employees.”
The link goes to an Amazon advertorial, where they boast about how Sony has increased their efficiency by using Amazon’s services. This is the sentence from that essay that Zhukov-74 is alluding to:
“Platform unification has thus helped SIE reduce redundant compute costs by 10 percent and redundant operational time by 50 percent. The reduction in the number of implementations from four to one has also helped reduce operational costs by 60 percent.”
To be clear, the service Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service has such broad applications that we’re not sure if it’s really what led to Ryosuke’s team being shut down. But if that’s the case, it would certainly be possible that Sony found other divisions to downsize, and they found different reasons to lay off Ryosuke.
This hints at a broader problem for PlayStation than their current dilemma with having few first party games on the horizon. As we reported in the past, Hiroki Totoki bluntly stated in a Sony earnings call that their gaming division doesn’t understand overall growth and sustainable profitability.
Totoki was CEO and Chairman of PlayStation in the span of two years, but today, he heads the parent company Sony Group itself. While he has delegated PlayStation to Hideaki Nishino, these hint that Totoki looked for ways to trim down PlayStation. This may not even be the end of these layoffs and downsizing for Sony’s gaming side in the coming future.
