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Hermen Hulst: PlayStation is “Reevaluating how we operate” in light of the recent layoffs
Dr. Wilkinson
Gold Member
This is ridiculous. At this point, PS first-party should be a fully well-oiled machine, cranking out great games. PS5 is starting it's 4th year on the market, which is when first-party output should just be hitting it's peak. Whoever is managing PS first-party is doing a horrible, horrible job. Sorry but it's the truth.
Like I would love if more games went into that direction give it more of a comic book look. Instead of trying to be realistic as possibile. That’s why I like Japanese games because the art direction is a lot better with there games then a lot of western.
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fart town usa
Member
It meant I was dipping out of the thread but here I am again, lol.
I think it was you that said Sony had announced this in 2019. Yes, they announced a shift in focus, and now they announced a shift in focus from what they had previously announced. How can that not be considered "losing the plot", that's exactly what it is and that's exactly what Herman described in his typical upper management response to the layoffs.
I am honestly dumbfounded that some people have a hard time connecting the two. I'm not saying Sony makes outright trash games, but the games they've been making clearly are not providing the type of profit they need to sustain where they are currently at or provide profits they need to continue growing. Spider man 2 sold what, 10 million? That's great if there are 15million PS5 owners. There's what, 60+ million now? I spend so much money on videogames and rarely are they Sony developed titles. They are leaving money on the table by limiting their audience by operating on excessive development budgets and excessively long development cycles.
Businesses have to grow or else they turn into Sega or Atari. That's life in the business field, especially in the entertainment industry. Sony is altering their plan again because it's not sustainable to keep doing what they are doing. Sony said it themselves!
Maybe someday they will have room for 900 more employees and another studio but they clearly don't at this point and it's largely their own planning that brought it on themselves. I hope they can adjust quickly and get back to running a well oiled business.
yurinka
Member
We know that during years Firesprite has been working on a MP as we saw in job offers. Which was rumored to be Twisted Metal, but never was confirmed to be the case.
Jason said they cancelled a Twistead Metal game that was on its early stages and still not greenlighted.
In game development, companies don't work in a game for years if it isn't greenlighted. And don't hire for a game hat isn't greenlighed.
So we have these possibilities:
- As usal in Bloomberg and he particlarly, he made up something to spread FUD over Sony with lies, half truths and stuff put out of context, so his info would be incorrect, being the truth one of these cases:
- Sony wouldn't have cancelled anything from Firesprite, their MP continues under development
- Firesprite's MP game under development wasn't Twisted Metal and continues under development, but separatedly from it they had a pitch with some prototypes to make a Twisted Metal in the future that got rejected and not greenlighted
- Firesprite's MP game unde development was Twisted Metal, got greenlighed years ago and under production until got cancelled this week
- What he said is true and Sony cancelled a Twisted Metal game that was in early stages of development and not greenlighted, and this would be he Firesprite MP game we saw during years in the job offers. That would mean that unlike in the gaming companies Firesprite would have been working in a game without budget, not greenlighted by their bosses, and unlike in the gaming companies they have been hired for a game that wasn't going to be greenlighted until years in the future so they'd have that person sitting there without doing nothing and withot getting a salary, or Firesprite would have been funding that project without permission using fundings their bosses gave them for other projects.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
It meant I was dipping out of the thread but here I am again, lol.
I think it was you that said Sony had announced this in 2019. Yes, they announced a shift in focus, and now they announced a shift in focus from what they had previously announced. How can that not be considered "losing the plot", that's exactly what it is and that's exactly what Herman described in his typical upper management response to the layoffs.
I am honestly dumbfounded that some people have a hard time connecting the two. I'm not saying Sony makes outright trash games, but the games they've been making clearly are not providing the type of profit they need to sustain where they are currently at or provide profits they need to continue growing. Spider man 2 sold what, 10 million? That's great if there are 15million PS5 owners. There's what, 60+ million now? I spend so much money on videogames and rarely are they Sony developed titles. They are leaving money on the table by limiting their audience by operating on excessive development budgets and excessively long development cycles.
Businesses have to grow or else they turn into Sega or Atari. That's life in the business field, especially in the entertainment industry. Sony is altering their plan again because it's not sustainable to keep doing what they are doing. Sony said it themselves!
Maybe someday they will have room for 900 more employees and another studio but they clearly don't at this point and it's largely their own planning that brought it on themselves. I hope they can adjust quickly and get back to running a well oiled business.
I just think you're connecting dots that shouldn't be.
If any studio isn't continually delivering "hits", its vulnerable. The timing of that vulnerability to be downsized or closed isn't really on them, its how the overall business is doing. Like when the new CEO basically says "our revenue is great, but our profit margins are too low".
I wouldn't look at this as having anything to do with product type or quality. Its simply showing business as usual, with the wrinkle that it turns out that making successful GaaS is time-consuming and expensive, especially as when its undertaken by studios with no prior experience of that sort of title.
That intersects with what I wrote about vulnerability in a corporate sense being mostly about financial track-record. It doesn't matter that it probably wasn't by their own choice or design that London Studio worked on all sorts of projects, in VR, in GaaS, in interactive movies or whatever Erica was... What matters is that from the top-down perspective, none of those things were financial Hits.
Stable, long lasting first party studios always have a cash-cow franchise. So when the bean-counters get nervous and start to trim budgets, they always have a "thing" they can offer some security with.
fart town usa
Member
TheThreadsThatBindUs
Member
The platform software tie ratios.
DeaDPo0L84
Member
I play way less of them today, so that's different.
Stooky
Member
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Cross platform + social gaming has exploded in popularity.
SplunkyMunkey
Member
I love AAA games from sony. I know alot of u might think this js funny but would it be good at the same time Sony should think about Purchasing a publisher that they know it would bring in steady flow of money? I was thinking capcom or Sega at first but at this dire moments I'm more thinking of Take two
ChorizoPicozo
Member
i think the issue goes beyond a money. Is the time these games take to make.
Aces High
Member
TheBomb
Member
You show them!
Killjoy-NL
Member
That would be me.
Care to elaborate?
Because at no point does it seem like they are changing from what they started talking about in 2019.
sono
Gold Member
I don't understand this. There have been many platforms and the internet for years. Do you have examples.
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
"exploded in popularity" does not suggest these things didn't exist until only recently.
Cross platform gaming is relatively new. Fortnite heralded in the cross platform era in 2018. The rest of the industry soon followed.
Social gaming has exploded in popularity too as the industries most profitable games are so because friends like hanging out with friends in game. That wasn't the case 10 years ago.
Dr. Wilkinson
Gold Member
The list of games that fall into the category you are describing that are *enduringly successful* is a very, very short list. What typically happens is a game will explode in popularity at the outset because it's free-to-start, and then within a few months it's a ghost town and no one else talks about it again, and then it gets shut down and if you did spend any real money in it, sorry for your loss. That is why I think games like that are gross and I actively ignore them and will never play them.
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Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
And yet Hermen is proving to be right. The success of Helldivers 2 suggest you might have a gross misreading of the market.
The success of Helldivers 2 didn’t stop them from canceling some planned live service projects. Helldivers 2 resonated with the market. Thats no guarantee that others will.
The market is unforgiving to a significant percentage of live service games. That’s the only read.
Dr. Wilkinson
Gold Member
The question isn't how it launches, it's how much longevity the game has. Which I'm sure you know, of course. And as head of Worldwide Studios, he should be overseeing the PS5 cycle going into it's 4th year as the peak output of first-party software, before they start to pivot to next-gen development in years 5-7. Not having any first-party software as the PS5 reaches the peak of it's cycle is the opposite of what should be happening right now. So maybe he's not doing as well as you might seem to think he is.
Live-service games have a tendency to pop right at launch, and then peter out over time, and very few have staying power.
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Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
False.
It's about RoI (return on investment). Getting the bag up front vs getting the bag over a length of time matters little. Arrowhead Studios is now scrambling to hire, and is planning a more ambitious roadmap because the game is already so successful.
Single player projects get cancelled all the time too. Hiroki Titoki already said PlayStations mid to long term plans surrounding Live Service remain unchanged.
Nothing is guaranteed. We saw Respawn just cancel its SP Star Wars game. The general trend however is very clear at this point.
Dr. Wilkinson
Gold Member
Wrong. Scrambling to hire as a reaction to what is usually short-term success is often a double-edged sword and leads to lay-offs and financial tumult later on. It's generally poor planning, as a basic rule. You should hire slowly & responsibly over time, as your business grows, so you don't have to do layoffs, rather than panicking because you didn't plan properly. As is happening throughout the entire industry right now. ROI will be unclear for some time on this game, if they make plans and spend their resources hiring based off the expectation the game will be played by many people over a long period of time. Knowing how most Live-service games go, that is a risky gamble to take. It could very well be by the time their "ambitious road map" releases to the public, most players have moved onto something else, and they are already at that point releasing content to a diminishing audience, when their resources would be better served developing something completely new.
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yurinka
Member
"PS5 is in its fourth year, and we are at a stage where we need to step back and look at what our business needs. At the same time, our industry has experienced continuing and fundamental change which affects how we all create, and play, games."
In these 4 years:
- In platforms mobile userbase and revenue kept growing faster than console + PC, now is the majority of the game revenue
- In business models GaaS already had the majority of userbase and revenue, but addons (so mostly GaaS) was the fastest growing revene source even in console and PS, replacing game sales revenue
- Multiple companies included Sony pushed to grow in GaaS, PC and mobile due to the reasons posted above + others
- Game subs, VR, cloud still represent a small portion of the market but had a great growth
- The percent of game sales that are digital kept growing a lot
- Some mobile + PC + console games like Genshin Impact became a big hit
- Handheld PCs started to grow and become a promising market that may impact (Nintendo's) portable market in the future
- Sony kept growing their market share to the point of forcing MS go multiplatform
- Covid, blocking the Russian market and specially the big inflation that was there before caused a finantial crisis that stagnated the consumer spent in gaming keeping it flat in the last couple of years, when it was growing since the '80s
But many of these things to address these topics take a lot of time, so results of things started before or during this 4 years period won't be seen until a few or several years in the future.
Game companies often cancel games, have been doing so since 4 decades ago. Cancelling a couple GaaS isn't anything special, it's the same they always did with non-GaaS games.
But yes, Sony now has MLB, Gran Turismo, Destiny and Helldivers as successful GaaS hits. And the next one pretty likely will be Concord.
No, they only canned a couple of the GaaS under development.
There's a like a dozen more already in the market (MLB, Gran Turismo, Firewall, Destiny, Helldivers) or in the works (Fairgame$, Horizon Online, Deviation's game, Marathon, other Bungie new IP, Firesprite MP game being worked during years if it isn't the canned and still not greenlighted Twisted Metal).
Plus some of the games they'll publish from China/India Hero Project that may be GaaS (Convallaria seems to be MP game, probably GaaS) and the mobile games they have in the works, which is fair to assume may be all of them GaaS.
The total gaming market revenue and userbase is moving to GaaS, and the console game revenue is moving from game sales revenue to digital addons (GaaS) revenue. So all big publishers like Sony will increase / are increasing their investment on GaaS, won't decrease it.
The games sold per console in PS4+PS5 are in the all time record for any console in gaming history, specially for PS5.
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Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
Damn, I never thought of that.
The success of Helldivers 2 is actually a bad thing because now that their studio is growing it's going to lead to disease, famine, and war.
Arrowhead Studios should probably lay off a percentage of employees so that they can ultimately thrive in the long term.
How do we get you over to their studio so you can inform them of their mistakes?
Interfectum
Member
Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
The market shows us that this is the wrong strategy.
They're clearly struggling behind the scenes, and just like we saw with the PS3, they're more than capable of squandering previous successes. The industry seems to be in a state of transition/upheaval at the moment, and PlayStation doesn't seem to be as well positioned as others to deal with it.
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ChorizoPicozo
Member
ReBurn
Gold Member
How games are consumed has definitely changed. The most popular games today are definitely not the epic single player adventures that grew out of the PS360 days. The maturation of mobile computing and the mobile phone becoming the central device in people's lives is impacting gaming more than people like to acknowledge. If a gaming company doesn't have an effective mobile gaming strategy they're just leaving money on the table because that's where the most people are.
One of your bullet points in regard to PS5 is standing out to me and I'm not sure I'm reading it in the way I'm supposed to.
- Sony kept growing their market share to the point of forcing MS go multiplatform
You think that's not some over exaggerated editor editing trying to make the place look like a hip and laid back software company to work at?FIX THIS FIRST:
I know it's from the Xbox Direct but I have no doubt Sony's western Studios have the same chill laid back tech corp culture that these big companies love to show off in their promotional videos.
Look, I know making games is hard alright, but why the fuck do you feel entitled to play pool, board games or chill in a hammock at the office? Hell, some of them are probably still working from home in their sweat pants sending emails about their favorite coffee brew. Get to work you overpaid adults babies.
At my software company we had pool tables, music rooms, PS5 console/TV rooms and even a massage chair room. when a film crew came they would usually ask the staff to use those things to film even though most of the time was spent not doing those things. It helps for recruitment but they would certainly crack the whip if they saw people using it in work hours and not getting their jiras/timesheets done on time
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-Profit margins tanking
-Shrinking number of first party releases
-Recent studio acquisitions don't seem to be paying off (Bungie,Firesprite)
The next ~5 years are going to be very interesting. They really have to focus on growing their presence on PC, mobile, cloud, and other platforms.
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drganon
Member
Perrott
Member
Their multiplayer game was Twisted Metal, both VGC and Tom Henderson have reported on it, and they even had the former director of MotorStorm Apocalypse helming the project, and it was even described in job listings as a multiplayer vehicular action game but with on-foot combat as well. Hell, we even have a leaked XDEV spreadsheet from 2021 that confirms the reports that a Twisted Metal game was in development at Lucid before shifting studios to Firesprite, as reported by VGC. The fact that it wasn't greenlit only speaks to the quality and lack of direction of what they were making, in hopes to capture some lighting in a bottle so they'd have something to go along with the Peacock show.
Firesprite was also working on another MP action game at the time of the acquisition, a shooter new IP as it was described in job listings I believe, but they canned it in 2022 as it was never referenced again in their careers site.
Now they're only working on the dark narrative adventure game.
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Moriarty1889
Member
Hulst is the culprit and has done fuck all at his job other than ruining first party output. He should never have been put in this position.
yurinka
Member
Greenlight = pitch of the game gets approved and they start developing it
According to Jason Shredder Twisted Metal wasn't greenlight, which means it couldn't be under development 3 years ago.
We saw since several years ago in Firesprite job offers that they were working on a MP game that featured vehicle combat and on foot combat. People assumed it was Twisted Metal but nothing confirmed it.
But if Jason Shredder is right, it couldn't be Twisted Metal because studios don't work during over 3 or 4 years before greenlighing it and even less hire people for it if they don't have a budget greenlighted for it.
Also, if the project really was being made at Lucid and was moved to Firesprite it would mean that it was already greenlighted even before moving it to Firesprite.
So at least one of these "journalists" was wrong or lying because things don't match.
The "leaked" spreadsheet from 4chan supposedly from XDEV, which featured many things that back then were wrong and that any game dev knew weren't possible (such as a junior dev leading a senior), other ones that were already publicly known to be real or were already highly rumored, and other things we later knew were wrong, didn't include Twisted Metal. It had a project codename you assume was Twisted Metal. We also knew then and know now that the list missed several projects where XDEV was working back then. That list was fake.
Firesprite has a ton of former Liverpool Studio (including old school XDEV, which originally was part of Liverpool Studio), Evolution Studios and Bizarre Creation workers, and also from Supermassive or Lionhead (and some of them from Lucid, who also has/had some workers from Liverpool Studio, Evolution and Bizarre Creations). But having worked at Lucid doesn't confirm it to be Twisted Metal (or Motorstorm, or Wipeout).
The only thing we have confirmed for real is that Firesprite fired some people and that for years they have been working (and may continue working) in both a MP game with both on foot and vehicle combat and a dark horror adventure, also mentioned in their old job offers.
It's incredibly unlikely that Firesprite were working on two GAAS vehicular combat games + a horror game (which seems to be Until Dawn 2). Their MP game (Twisted Metal) was cancelled resulting in layoffs, and now they just have their horror game. And honestly I'm not sure how successful an Until Dawn 2 will be... So I'd be a little worried for Firesprite's future.
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genesisblock
Member
If people thought this was just as GaaS problem, then they clearly missed the memo way back in the PS3 era. The moment GTAV was reported to be north of 100 million plus, that was going to be the standard moving forward and no solutions to optimize costs and now every other AAA games is hitting those numbers ironically, without the dynamism or features of a GTAV game
yurinka
Member
Jason Schreier said the cancelled Twisted Metal "Despite some recent scuttlebutt suggesting that Twisted Metal was close to release, the game was in early development and wasn't yet greenlit".
So it can't be the Firesprite MP game with combat on vehicles + on foot we saw in their job offers during years. Also, it isn't compatible with having the game under development at Lucid, moving it to Firesprite and years later still being in early development and without being greenlight.
The 12 GaaS thing was announced in 2021/2022, so they should be already greenlighted and under development if they planned to release them before March 2026.
Either the Jason was wrong mentioning i wasn't greenlighted and in early stages, so the Twisted Metal he menions it's the same we saw in the job offers, or it's a different game (the oher one could be a Wipeout reboot, also includes vehicular combat but not on foot).
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StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
Its a follow the leader approach.
When one big company goes big and leads with giant sales and budget, all the other big companies follow suit. No different then the trend to rogue games, shooters, battle royales etc...
Food and drink are similar. Past 10 years suddenly every pop can a cherry variant. And at some point years back there was that trend to anything in the bakery section being red velvet.
Dr. Wilkinson
Gold Member
There should be way more than there are/have been. I think a lot of time has been wasted behind the scenes trying to get studios to make a live service game that they aren’t used to making. Huge waste of time/ resources.
What they should focus on is what they do best and double down on making the best narrative-driven single-player games in the industry.
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AncientOrigin
Member
Herman Hulst is absolutely useless.He is doing nothing good nothing productive nothing for the brand nothing for gamer’s nothing for the future.Has no clue.
ChorizoPicozo
Member
Respect daddy. He will be the best
MacReady13
Member
Sony decided to almost exclusively go down the route of 1st party triple AAA games like Last of Us, God Of War, Spiderman, Uncharted and Horizon. Very similar types of games that are growing REAL long in the tooth. Where is the old Sony that produced games like Wipeout, Parappa, Everybody's golf, Fantavision, Loco Roco etc...? Where are these obscure, fun and original titles that aren't trying to be like Hollywood movies and just give us unique and fun games?!? Why bother spending $300 million and in turn help ruin your company when releasing those smaller games is what made the Playstation name a powerful force in console gaming?
Killjoy-NL
Member
There's nothing wrong with cancelling a few games if you have a multiple in development.
All they really need is a handfull of successful titles.
If some don't seem to work out, it's better to just cancel them, then waste money and time.
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