Some surprising news has come up when it comes to Insomniac Games, and this does relate to their latest project, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.
As reported by Tech4Gamers, a former Insomniac employee has come forward to reveal that there were layoffs in the studio as well. This all came to light in a LinkedIn post where Creative Assembly staffer Alexander Rehm expressed solidarity with game developers who had recently been fired. (Creative Assembly also recently had layoffs themselves.)
One Jonathan Freidenberg commented on Rehm’s post, stating “Can’t forget insomniac! Few people laid off like me 3ish months ago.”
Freidenberg’s estimate places the date or dates of these layoffs in either July or August. This places it far earlier than the recent string of layoffs following PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan’s announcement that he was retiring from the company.
We don’t have enough information to make a determination for the cause of these layoffs. It is more likely that it is unrelated to the recent wave of layoffs across other Sony owned studios.
Friedenberg’s own LinkedIn account says this about his time at Insomniac:
“Program Manager/Talent Specialist
Insomniac Games
Oct 2022 – Sep 2023 1 year
United States
Laid off due to headcount reduction.
I managed the entire intern program from start to finish.
From the initial hiring of the interns to their entire time and curriculum at the studio.
Building out development plans and coordinating every event all summer for them during Spiderman 2s heaviest production time.
I also coordinated hundreds of interviews for all the associate level positions at the studio.
Managed the public facing HR info box, talent social media accounts and twitch streams.”
Prior to this stint, Freidenberg worked at PlayStation as a talent specialist from May 2021 to October 2022. This initial work with PlayStation was as a contractor, but Freidenberg does not mention if the same is true of his time with Insomniac.
Again, given a lack of information, we can’t ascertain the circumstances behind these layoffs. It is possible that Freidenberg was a contractor who was not renewed, and the same was the case for his fellow employees.
Whatever the terms of their employment, of course, it is still a shame that Freidenberg and his peers were laid off at all. Freidenberg is gainfully employed today at a company named Workday, outside of the video game industry.
If the firings happened because of more serious reasons, we should not really speculate on at this time. At the very least, there is this claim that Insomniac fired people who worked on Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, months before it was released. It would certainly be helpful if Insomniac spoke up to shed more light on this situation.
