Sony Bend lays off 30% of their staff (40 people)
- Thread starter Gaiff
- Start date
StreetsofBeige
Member
Pretty much.
Likely they gassed a bunch of people who would had worked in roles for a game WIP. But since they are starting from scratch, dont need em. Which means if their new game is in the starter's block and gets worked on an released as normal, it wont come out for 4-5 years right in the middle of PS6 territory.
Bernardougf
Member
Anything not announced until next year is basically a crossgen title Imho...
Lunarorbit
Member
Sony really fucked up days gone release. This is one of the stupidest non gaas decisions Sony made when they started fighting with the games director and then he went nuclear.
"Besides without me or Jeff, would you want a sequel?": Days Gone Director is at it Again
Days Gone was an underrated PlayStation gem that was released in an underwhelming state back in 2019 but Bend Studio was able to bounce back and got the game
fandomwire.com
Gavin blames sonys gaas strategy for not getting a sequel
nial
Member
The thing is that SCE as a whole barely ever had an actual culture. Decisions made by SCEA and SCEE on the past never exactly reflected any uniquely Japanese approach, and keep in mind that these two branches were always heavily involved on PlayStation as a whole, rather than being purely sales & marketing subsidiaries like NOA or NOE.
I don't think you wouldn't have gotten TLOU2 or SM2 under Japanese SCEI, precisely because as I already said, they were barely involved in anything beyond Japanese game production. It's exactly like this nowadays, but instead of having different leadership for each branch (think, Andrew House for SCEI, Shawn Layden for SCEA and Jim Ryan for SCEE), it's now a single global leadership (as it is, Hideaki Nishino for SIEI, SIEA and SIEE).
Kvally
Member
Their website says over 150 people. It also says they are hiring.
TRADE/CRAFT - Bend Studio
With over 25 years of experience, Bend Studio is a Sony first-party AAA game developer, located at the base of Oregon’s beautiful Cascade Mountains.
www.bendstudio.com
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
So, less than 30%.Their website says over 150 people. It also says they are hiring.
TRADE/CRAFT - Bend Studio
With over 25 years of experience, Bend Studio is a Sony first-party AAA game developer, located at the base of Oregon’s beautiful Cascade Mountains.
Mibu no ookami
Banned
Of the studios still in existence? I'd probably say Media Molecule is probably worse managed. Maybe Firesprite.
The decline of Sony Europe has been massively understated. Outside of Guerrilla and Nixxes, they don't really have anything worth talking about anymore. They have to hope that Housemarque can really hit a homerun and join the ranks of the rest of the high end studios.
Again, focus and investment should shift to Japan, not in the sense of "let's randomly move the hq there because I randomly hate what I perceive to be western sensibilities and prefer Japanese sensibilities that I'm not at all familiar with, but like the sound of" but rather because Japanese development is affordable and fills a niche that western studios aren't.
Kenneth Haight
Gold Member
Days gone was pretty decent when I played it on PS5 and definitely could have had a decent sequel if given the time.
Schmendrick
Banned
the last game they released was Days Gone 6 years ago and now it looks like they will have nothing to show for for another ~2-3 years......they are lucky to still be around at all.
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Venuspower
Member
MacReady13
Member
My goodness Sony completely shit the bed this gen games wise. Sad to see these people lose their jobs but in the need to jump into the live service crowd, Sony shot themselves in both feet. Terrible fucking stuff.
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Fabieter
Member
Its so weird they wasted existing studios instead of only going for second party's.
I'm almost afraid to ask - but what are 'regressive' hiring practices supposed to be?
Mind you in my experience - game studios in general had collectively poor hiring practices in 00s and 10s alike, but I've stopped paying them attention in 20ies.
{insert code here}
Member
And Killzone/RFOM remakes, Socom, Warhawk/Starhawk, LBP, Infamous , Twisted Metal, Motorstorm, Wipeout, Driveclub, Jak & Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Sly Cooper, and...
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kruis
Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
Just like Blue Point Games. Can you believe there were people whoactually believed Sony's promise that despite their move to GAAS we'd get the same amount of single player games as before ...?
Bernardougf
Member
All because of the purple hair media flipping out about too much testosterone and some bike ridding line....... and than giving the game low grades because of it. Ill bet anyone, if the main character of that game is gay and its the exact same game with the exact same lines but its between two gay bikers.. it would get mutch better grades and even awards...
StreetsofBeige
Member
Funny thing is Sony's big budget first party SP games all sell a ton. I think DG was their worst performing one and still sold around 7-8 million copies. All the other ones like GoT, GOW, LOU, UC4 etc.... sell 10+ million where some sell 20M.
All they had to do is focus on that, but they skewed to GAAS. So even Bend Studios which has historically focused on SP game even went GAAS. Not surprised it got got canceled.
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Mibu no ookami
Banned
Their website says over 150 people. It also says they are hiring.
TRADE/CRAFT - Bend Studio
With over 25 years of experience, Bend Studio is a Sony first-party AAA game developer, located at the base of Oregon’s beautiful Cascade Mountains.
They have 0 jobs listed on greenhouse for Bend Studios. They aren't hiring.
Bluepoint has 2 job listings on greenhouse, which isn't to suggest that they're actively going to fill those roles.
Topher
Identifies as young
Exactly. Force the studio to follow this fools errand called Gaas and then fire people when it fails. Brilliant job, Sony. But enjoy your record profits
Mibu no ookami
Banned
That's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Insomniac is first-party because Spider-Man did so well. Had The Order 1886 done well, Ready at Dawn would be first party.
Killzone never sold 10 million copies.
You've literally cited a handful of games by like 4 development studios, one of them being heralded as one of the best in the industry which is Naughty Dog...
You have Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Insomniac, Guerrilla, and Sucker Punch. Sucker Punch started work on Ghost of Yotei and they're just now releasing their first PS5 game in October. Single player games still take time to develop. Out of these studios all have released new PS5 games except for Naughty Dog, but it isn't enough for people.
Live Service took little away from SP if at all, but gamers aren't logical like that.
Fake
Member
After the remastered is kinda expected. Who played the Days Gone Remastered for PS5 know how bizarre that game went.
Very very weird out of place. Sounds like they made the remaster at the last second.
Not to mention all those years doing absolute nothing, assisting ND to make TLOUS2 instead of a possible Days Gone 2, and I not even touch the GAAS fiasco.
Hermen will sure be fired at june 12. No way this guy remain.
What a total disaster this generation for Sony. Relying into FIFA, CoD and others shits like Fortnite to sell PS5.
Very very weird out of place. Sounds like they made the remaster at the last second.
Not to mention all those years doing absolute nothing, assisting ND to make TLOUS2 instead of a possible Days Gone 2, and I not even touch the GAAS fiasco.
Hermen will sure be fired at june 12. No way this guy remain.
What a total disaster this generation for Sony. Relying into FIFA, CoD and others shits like Fortnite to sell PS5.
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DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Hiring trigglypuffs that make places full of "toxic positivity" with walking on egg shells and having "queer knitting clubs" on actual company work time (see: Bungie). Where your ideas get shouted down and colorful ideologue vomit gets precedent. Fuglifying everything to appease an imaginary "modern audience" that doesn't even exist. We've seen the fruits of those labors the past 5+ years.
Bingo.
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Kacho
Member
Please understand
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Good Lord let's pray so.
The fires, the protests, the studio closures, the rising real estate costs...all signs that maybe California ain't it.
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StreetsofBeige
Member
Bend Studios history of work skews heavy to SP and DG sold 7-8M copies. Why get them to change to GAAS, especially when pretty much all of Sony's MP/GAAS games have failed except GT and baseball?
SEGAvangelist
Member
Mibu no ookami
Banned
Sony really fucked up days gone release. This is one of the stupidest non gaas decisions Sony made when they started fighting with the games director and then he went nuclear.
"Besides without me or Jeff, would you want a sequel?": Days Gone Director is at it Again
Days Gone was an underrated PlayStation gem that was released in an underwhelming state back in 2019 but Bend Studio was able to bounce back and got the game
Gavin blames sonys gaas strategy for not getting a sequel
First Bend never pitched Sony DG2. Second, he was fired because he was an asshole and difficult work with, he acknowledges this himself in an interview with Jaffe, his behavior on twitter alone tells you what it would have been like to work with him. He flipped out when they put Deacon in Astro Bot and then complained about Day's Gone not being celebrated in a commercial for the 30th anniversary. He seems bipolar.
There are a multitude of reasons why you wouldn't tie up a studio on a zombie game in 2019/2020... the ceiling is super low on that, but please continue to push the idea that a Day's Gone 2 was really a good idea during peak zombie fatigue time. Not saying live service was a good choice either for this studio with limited multiplayer experience, but DG2 was not viable for a AAA studio.
And there is zero evidence that Sony has "forced" any studios to do live service.
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hemo memo
You can't die before your death
It's almost half the studio, which is first-party. Where is the guy who said the industry was healthy? This is ridiculous.
Topher
Identifies as young
I didn't say anything about Day's Gone 2 my man. Yeah, no "evidence" Sony forced live service. They all didn't just decide to go that way on their own though.
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Fabieter
Member
So freaking weird to do this with studio like bend or bpg. Its fair to go after gaas but holly ball did they fuck up the whole initiative.
Mibu no ookami
Banned
See above.
First, don't think they were forced to do anything. Tell me why Sucker Punch isn't working on a live service or Housemarque. These studios largely pick their own projects and every interview with these studios have suggested that.
Second, that's massively misleading.
Helldivers 2 is one of Sony's most successful games of all time. Marvel Tokon is going to follow that up with maybe even greater success.
The problem isn't live service, it's the strategy and the execution of it in most cases.
7-8 million copies mostly at low price per unit and add zombie fatigue in the equation and the low critical reception... it fully makes sense to move on from Day's Gone.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
Apparently it was a studio vote. Between doing Day's Gone 2 or this GaaS trash in their pitch. Caused studio leads and designers to leave, and them to virtue signal about the "inclusivity and love" when he was exposing them and their "toxic positivity" culture.
Now we see the fruits of that "cult's" labor.
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Mibu no ookami
Banned
The whole industry is moving towards live service as the pie for SP shrinks.
Should Red Dead and GTA have live service or was that a bad idea too?
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
RDR2? Shows it was a bad idea (as in mismanaged). They no longer support it and haven't for years now. It's on an AI XP bonus cycle now.
Perrott
Member
Nah, they dug their own grave:
- New hires at the studio made to get Days Gone out the door didn't want to continue to work with creative director (and sole writer!) John Garvin because of his temperament.
- Bend management shows him the door the very week Days Gone comes out.
- Following Garvin's exit, they go for a flat management structure, with no hierarchy in place. This makes it so that people who, for instance, don't understand shit about game design such as your newly-hired Hollywood writers or an art director suddenly begin to meddle with the vision for Days Gone 2.
- A project that a sizeable amount of people at the studio, including management, didn't seem interested in pursuing at all, in spite of then-WWS president Shawn Layden being all in on the franchise.
- Eventually, studio management has declined Days Gone 2 it's first greenlight for so long, refusing to take it to, say, Scott Rohde, Connie Booth or any other WWS executive along those lines, that it becomes clear that the game was not going to happen.
- On top of it, management's plan to bring in Hollywood writers had failed, since their vision clashed with that of Days Gone game director Jeff Ross, who still remained at the studio at the time, fighting to get the sequel - and eventually even an open-world Resistance game - off the ground.
- Without a project and without the narrative staff to get any new singleplayer, story-based game going on their own, the newly-appointed head of WWS Hermen Hulst makes the call to have Bend partner with creative leads from Naughty Dog, who would provide the creative direction and writing for the project, on an Uncharted spin-off game starring Sully.
- Bend game director Jeff Ross, who had already collaborated with Naughty Dog on Uncharted: Golden Abyss, gladly takes on the task and so a collaboration begins and, in order to keep as much of Bend's workforce employed while the Uncharted game navigates pre-production, the studio is called in to go lend Naughty Dog a hand in establishing the foundations for the open-world San Francisco in which The Last Of Us Online was planned to take place.
- Unsurprisingly, folks at Bend's trenches once again show their dissatisfaction with having, in their eyes, become a "Naughty Dog support studio" and eventually studio management asks PlayStation Studios executives if they could be taken off the Uncharted project and instead given the chance to pursue an original game of their own, not Days Gone, not Uncharted, but a new IP.
- With no writers at the studio, this meant that the new IP would inherently have to be multiplayer-focused, a live-service game. Having had enough of this bullshit already, with morons at the trenches having killed two projects already, Jeff Ross departs the studio in late 2020.
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Tiago Rodrigues
Member
Then blame retarded Bend. It was their decision to not make a Days Gone 2, not Sony. If anything Sony is keeping the IP alive with a remaster, PC release and a movie planned.
Topher
Identifies as young
Man.....you are arguing points I never even made.
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ChorizoPicozo
Member
thicc_girls_are_teh_best
Member
Can we at least agree they need to get TF out of California? Even incentives like tax breaks for game development, I don't think they exist there (anymore).
Like move headquarters to Nebraska, or Montana, or Illinois. Or even somewhere in Europe. It doesn't have to be Japan, it just needs to not be California.
Hate to admit it but you and
BennyBlanco
are likely right on that take. Still unbelievable both studios got detoured due to the GAAS stuff, and it's not like they were multi-team studios (to my knowledge).At the very least I hope SIE expand them both into multi-team spots in order to develop 2 or more games in parallel, and don't ever put them on GAAS again. I know Bluepoint wants to do an original IP likely, but they're also masters at remakes. A two-team studio setup would let them do both.