Those of you who pay close attention to the games industry – or even tech sector at large – will know that many companies are being struck with layoffs right now, even the ones that are performing well. It’s perhaps not too surprising to hear that, following a bunch of job cuts at Naughty Dog earlier in the year, Sony’s Visual Arts Service Group is the latest developer to be pruned.
For those not familiar with VASG, it’s an internal division which collaborates with all first-party developers and some third-parties on tasks such as motion capture, music, mixing, and more. It’s one of the Japanese giant’s secret sauces: a highly talented business unit capable of assisting more well-known developers to add that extra bit of sparkle to a project.
While the scale of the layoffs is largely unknown, several former employees have posted about their situation on LinkedIn over the past week or so. In the meantime, God of War creator David Jaffe has teased on Twitter that more bad news is coming for PlayStation in the coming days, but he didn’t elaborate or share any further details.
As alluded, this all comes at a time where job security in the games industry is pretty fragile. Many, many developers have been laid off this year alone, with Embracer Group most notably scaling back its operations after it failed to raise enough capital to stabilise its reckless acquisitions. Hopefully everyone who’s been made redundant can find another position smoothly and swiftly.
