David Scott Jaffe has shared a shocking update on Connie Booth and the situation behind the scenes at PlayStation.
Following his account that Booth had left the company, but Jaffe now claims in a new video that Connie was actually fired. Jaffe clarifies he doesn’t know the journalistic standard for verification, but given his connections and contacts at Sony, he feels certain that he has verified this information.
Jaffe further states that Booth was not given prior notice or even told in advance, in Jaffe’s words, ‘it just happened.’
Jaffe also compares it to the experiences of Shawn Layden and Allan Becker, also Sony veterans. Allan was Senior Vice President at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios until 2020. He got a call near the start of his last week, and told that his last day was Friday. In sharp contrast, Shawn was literally escorted out of the building on the same day. Connie’s firing was somewhere in between, according to Jaffe.
Jaffe’s source connected this firing to Jim Ryan’s plan to push PlayStation to live service games. As we know, Sony’s existing studios were not happy about the change. The fate of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Factions game was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Now here’s where things get strange. Somehow, Connie got blamed for what happened next. Jaffe doesn’t know the exact details here, so it’s hard to speculate on it, but Jaffe considers it strange that Connie ended up on the bad side of this. As we had noted, she is a veteran of the PlayStation team right from the very start, and her roots in Sony go even deeper than that.
Jaffe then revealed that Connie’s team left at the same time that they left. Now Jaffe believes that it isn’t likely that they were fired, just because she was fired. But once again, Jaffe isn’t speculating further than that.
Finally, Jaffe revealed as an aside that Hermen Hulst was in favor of cutting down all Sony’s Japan Studio. For those who don’t remember, Sony actually did pull this trigger, laying off staff who had worked on Knack. Historically, this is also the same studio who worked on Patapon, LocoRoco, Ape Escape, Days Gone, and others.
We cannot take it as a given that Jaffe’s source reflects the entire mood inside Sony, but it does not paint a favorable picture of the company. It’s also strange to be learning about these goings on which would otherwise just be completely out of public view. In any case, it’s not really in our place as fans to intrude on how Sony handles their affairs. We hope, at least, that Sony makes the right decisions for PlayStation’s fans, as well as their workers, and maybe even their stockholders too.
