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After canceling multiple games, Sony is trimming its oversized workforce across several PlayStation studios.
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Just a couple of months into 2025, the gaming industry, still reeling from a disastrous previous year of big-budget failures remains as tumultuous as ever. WB Games has shut down Monolith Productions after the studio spent 2-3 years developing a Wonder Woman game, meanwhile, Sony is entering the new year by trimming excess fat across its PlayStation studios.
A little over a month ago, Sony announced the cancellation of two unannounced live-service games from Bend Studio and Bluepoint Games. Not to mention last years $400 million loss attributed to Concord, which was quickly followed by the studio’s closure. In a desperate attempt to balance the books, something most of Sony’s recent releases have failed to do, the company has now laid off several employees from its Visual Arts studio as part of a broader restructuring of its U.S. operations.
The San Diego-based Visual Arts team, which primarily serves as an internal support studio for other PlayStation developers, including Naughty Dog and their seemingly endless remasters of The Last of Us, is the latest casualty of Sony’s ongoing cost-cutting measures.
Former PlayStation Visual Arts project manager Abby LeMaster took to LinkedIn on Monday to confirm that several developers from the San Diego-based support studio had been laid off that day. LeMaster described the cuts as hitting “hard,” noting that developers with “decades” of experience and talent—skills that will be “extraordinarily difficult to recoup” were among those let go.
Speaking of things that are extraordinarily difficult to recoup, Sony’s hands off approach of pouring hundreds of millions into game development has proven to be an unsustainable economic strategy. The gaming industry is at an all-time high in terms of sheer workforce size, with companies like Ubisoft employing thousands across numerous global studios. And yet, despite this unprecedented scale, gaming as a whole has never been in a more dire position.
Why? Rampant developmental malpractice, corporate greed, and mismanagement have become the industry’s defining traits. Modern gaming is now dictated by ESG policies and diversity quotas, forcing publishers to prioritize ideological messaging over authentic design and quality products.
The result? A flood of repulsive character designs aimed at racial and sexual inclusivity, a growing hostility toward White people amongst developers themselves who push for gender ambiguity, replacing traditional male and female identities with nameless descriptors as the industry aggressively pushes for LGBT representation in every release, whether consumers want it or not.
The industry is plagued by globalized social ethics, now hires radical activists who openly despise their audience and use beloved franchises as vehicles for their ideological agendas.
Today, a third of game developers identify as female or non-binary, yet despite efforts to make games more “inclusive” to broader audiences, these big-budget releases repeatedly fail to generate interest or financial success. Sony too have been particularly reckless in this regard.
Their recent disaster, Concord, was a direct casualty of prioritizing ethics-driven game design over consumer appeal. The project reportedly cost over $200 million, only to be unceremoniously scrapped weeks after launch, with the studio behind it swiftly shut down.
Yet, in the endlessly bloated and incompetent gaming industry, failure is rarely a career-ending setback it’s a stepping stone. Many former Concord developers have already landed at Microsoft, where they will now contribute to 343 Industries’ ongoing mission to destroy Halo, further proving that the gaming industry is one of the few places where failing upward is not just common, it’s expected.
Subsequently, Sony has also laid off staff from its Malaysia Studio, which was established in 2020. Reports indicate that upwards of twenty employees are set to depart, while additional staff members who had been working on Bend Studio’s now-canceled project have also been let go.
At one point, Studio Malaysia was rumored to be assisting with Bluepoint’s canceled game, which may explain why the support team was included in the recent job cuts. In the wake of Concord’s failure, Sony appears to be realizing—albeit too late—that the general gaming audience has no interest in online-only live-service multiplayer titles designed to appeal to no one except corporate beneficiaries like BlackRock, who demand compliance with global social agendas on diversity and inclusivity.
The people behind gaming’s decline suffered tremendously in 2024, with over 14,500 layoffs across studios and publishers worldwide. When combined with job cuts in 2022 and 2023, the total number of layoffs in just three years exceeds 33,500, a well-deserved reckoning for an industry that has become a revolving door for political activists.
Veteran developers with experience are routinely cast aside in favor of cheaper, inexperienced hires, often to cut costs but also to accelerate the industry’s fixation on ideological messaging.
A prime example of this trend is Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a game that made history not for its quality or innovation, but for being the first AAA title to include in-game dialogue options for players to express their transgender identity. It also features a stunning and brave cutscene in which one of the many unattractive, pansexual, romanceable companions comes out as non-binary to their parents, and it boasts the dubious distinction of being the first “mainstream” video game to offer transgender top surgery scars as a customizable option.
The game’s troubled development was overseen—at least for part of its six-plus-year production cycle by Corinne Birsche, a transgender woman who was handed the director’s chair at BioWare despite a track record of ideological tampering with The Sims.
The result was swift and expected, it was another big-budget failure, now being given away for free as part of Sony’s PlayStation Plus package as EA nor BioWare could manage to find a superficial audience for their medieval RPG in a world of magic and dragons to value real world identity problems and biological mutilation over enjoyment and storytelling.
The revival and second death of Dragon Age stands in stark contrast to the spectacular collapse of Concord, a failure so profound that it will be remembered for years. However, unlike BioWare’s unwanted resurgence, Sony has done little of value since, seemingly doubling down on anti-consumer practices. Their insistence on forcing PC players to link a PlayStation Network account even for single-player games alienated audiences, as did their decision to region-lock PC ports in over 170 countries due to PSN mandates.
The PC release of God of War Ragnarok, a major AAA title, underperformed, further proving Sony’s struggles in the space. The unnecessary Horizon Zero Dawn remaster, which offered marginal visual improvements despite expensive motion capture rework flopped upon release.
This failure all but confirmed suspicions that the Horizon franchise has been artificially propped up from the start as consumer audiences outside of console bundles aren’t particularly interested in playing as a fat ugly lesbian.
Sony’s decline seems irreversible. While Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sold well, it faced significant backlash from fans due to its weak storytelling, which portrayed Peter Parker as inept while positioning Miles Morales as the franchise’s future, its recent PC port garnered just 28,189 peak players on Steam despite Sony backtracking on the PSN requirement, simply offering in-game bonuses for those who link their accounts it still garnered less than half the players as its predecessor.
The game’s collaboration with Sweet Baby Inc led to an overbearing focus on forced identity politics, including what many found to be tone-deaf LGBT representation. Spanish players, in particular, voiced frustration over the game’s use of gender-neutral language.
The disastrous launch of Concord could have been a wake-up call for Sony, but they appear unable or more accurately, unwilling to change course. Despite axing planned live-service spin-offs for Horizon, God of War, and The Last of Us, they remain committed to Marathon and FAIRGAME$, both from Bungie and Haven Interactive.
These titles, featuring generic DEI-approved ambiguous character designs with FAIRGAME$ in particular being a PVP heist shooter centered around the theme of taking down capitalism by eating the rich are unlikely to attract a significant audience, especially with a $40 price tag that will deter even curious players.
Sony’s recent layoffs, while significant, do not match the scale of their 2024 downsizing, which saw the closure of London Studio, mass layoffs at Bungie, and an 8% shrinkage of the PlayStation brand globally.
However, the industry’s entrenched nepotism ensures that most of these displaced developers will find employment elsewhere, perpetuating the cycle of out-of-touch game development. Until the industry prioritizes creating games that consumers actually want rather than pushing agendas it will continue to crumble and I for one cannot wait.
