Game news “This shouldn’t happen” Affected by PlayStation layoffs, these developers give their opinion on one of the biggest crises in video games
Losses are heavy in the world of video games this year. Recently, Sony announced a wave of layoffs affecting a large part of its internal studios, and former members of Firesprite recently spoke out in defense of their colleagues.
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Sony studios in danger?
We feel like we’re repeating ourselves, but the year 2024 is off to a very bad start for video game developers. While we are only in the month of March, new layoffs were recently announced, this time concerning different studios under the wing of Sony Interactive Entertainment. One of these studios is none other than Firespiritwhich Sony acquired in 2021. Since then, Firespirit worked on The Playrooman augmented reality game that uses PlayStation Camerathe mobile project Run SackBoy! Run!but also several titles for PSVR like The Persistenceand more recently Horizon: Call of the Mountain.
Unfortunately, Firespirit was heavily impacted by the latest layoffs, and a service game project in the universe of Twisted Metal has been cancelled. Like many companies since the start of 2024, PlayStation Studios cites “economic reasons” for the layoffs caused, but this justification is far from sufficient in the eyes of the victims, and of the people who worked for Firespirit previously.
The elders of Firesprite speak out
In fact, several former members of Firespirit recently spoke on Twitter (or X), crying injustice towards the treatment of their colleagues. GameDev Catwho works as Lead/Senior Dev QA at Wushu Studios (one of the studios that collaborated with Larian to produce Baldur’s Gate III) and who worked at Firespirit for three years before and after the acquisition of the studio by Sony, considers that the developers from Firespirit deserve better than to be fired for such a random reason.
I’ll be brief here.
I worked at Firesprite for 3 years before & after the acquisition.
The studio was only acquired a few years ago, & yet Sony now announce they’ll be laying off my coworkers for no other reason than “financial”.
This shouldn’t be happening. This is not ok. pic.twitter.com/mdKX5YoVsN— GameDev Cat (@CatDevQA) February 27, 2024
Likewise, Javier Serranowho is now a Senior Gameplay Programmer at Saber Interactiveexpressed solidarity with the layoffs at Firespiritspecifying that his former colleagues give everything they have for each project and that they deserve better than dismissal for “economic reasons”:
I’m deeply sorry for my co-workers and friends at Firesprite, they fucking deserve better. All of them are hard workers, they have given the best in every project we have worked on in the company, to be laid off just because “financial”. If you need to talk or anything, I’m here
— Javier Serrano (@Sxicion) February 27, 2024
Unfortunately, it seems that the “economic reasons” cited by Sony are just the tip of the iceberg, because Eurogamer suggested a few days ago that the environment within the studio was less than ideal, citing “toxic behavior” from higher-ups, and periods of crunch to finish Horizon: Call of the Mountain in time. This atmosphere would be the cause of many departures in October 2023, in addition to the layoffs at the start of the year, and we hope that those affected will manage to find work quickly.
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