Layoffs at Evolution Studios, Guerrilla Cambridge & SCE London Studio

[Kresnik]

Every time one of these happens and Team Ico continues being a thing is a day I continue to get annoyed.

To be fair, I've thought for a while that London Studio needed trimming. When hyper-productive studios like Santa Monica were getting trimmed and London kept chugging along putting bombs like Wonderbook & Eyepet out, I wondered how long it would be.

Cambridge & Evolution, I actually thought were prime candidates for closing. Especially Cambridge who I presumed wouldn't have a place after Sony made it quite clear that they don't care about Vita. So if it saves them from that, then I welcome these changes. They were a pretty small studio anyway, though, so I wonder what size of a team they actually have left.

Very sad that it's had to come to this, though. I always thought Sony's greatest strength of the last generation was their WWS and to see it gutted like this, worldwide, is saddening. I'm guessing that this because we're going to see more of a move towards second-party partnerships while keeping the internal workforce at a minimum, but still. All the studios that have been hit with layoffs have done their part to support Sony's hardware and bring in new consumers, so it's very sad to see.

(I'm also a bit miffed because clearly SCE is performing well at the moment on the back of PS4. I'd have thought cutbacks in other sectors would've been a smarter decision, rather than the one division which has a chance of running away with things in the market it's in, but I guess things really are that bad at Sony at the moment. Still, for anyone saying that Kaz "isn't doing enough"... I really beg to differ)