Chris Deering, the former president of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE), has said during an appearance on My Perfect Console that he doesn’t feel the widespread industry layoffs are a result of corporate greed, and suggests those impacted should go and ‘drive an Uber or whatever.’
I don’t think it’s fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed. I always tried to minimise the speed with which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle and I didn’t want to end up having the same problems that Sony did in Electronics.
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While the former Sony executive acknowledged the layoffs that have hit his former company lately, including SIE London Studio, Deering added that “if the money isn’t coming in from the consumers on the last game, it’s going to be hard to justify spending the money for the next game.”
I think it’s probably very painful for the managers, but I don’t think that having skill in this area [of game dev] is going to be a lifetime of poverty or limitation. It’s still where the action is, and it’s like the pandemic but now you’re going to have to take a few…figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year. But keep up with your news and keep up with it, because once you get off the train, it’s much harder.
The games industry has seen an unprecedented number of job losses over the past 18 months or so, with Sony alone laying off around 900 employees back in February. The number of layoffs is now believed to have surpassed 11,500, and sadly shows no signs of slowing down.
[Source – My Perfect Console via Eurogamer]