They started rehiring a month or two after that and it would seem that those layoffs were the usual end of dev cycle layoffs.
You don't drop 10 year veterans as a normal end of development cycle process as they wouldn't be 10 year veterans if you did.
The people you do drop are temporary and contract workers, who are not actually laid off, but rather just have their contracts come to an end.
Similarly staff adjustments aren't on the scale of 20-40% of the entire studio.
If you were hiring permanent positions with the intention of laying them off at the end of the project, then you have awful employment practices and are intentionally deceiving your employees. If we want to go with that being Sony's standard operating practice, well, I don't think that looks very good for Sony at all.
Ah ok. I can understand that. But even as a genre in decline I'd imagine the overwhelmingly negative critical response to The Order would mean it would at least outsell that in its debut NPD. I mean we aren't simply talking about bad reviews here there was a lot of vitriol surrounding the game leading up to and following its release and that is certainly not the case for Quantum Break. As such I would expect it to sell at least a bit better. I certainly hope it does.
I guess my feeling is that The Order at least had the idea of being one of the first next-gen looking games out on the platforms, so there were people buying it to ogle at it, and also released a lot earlier in the generation in terms of where expectations were set.
Quantum Break looks to be a better product, but in a harder market. I'm not certain which of those will weigh in more, but I'm not holding my breath for it to do better.
