Considering that temporary help gets let go frequently, we have no numbers or positions, no actual confirmation of a cancelled project or what it was, with Santa Monica hiring, moving into a new building for more room, and the ridiculous early success of the PS4... I think any talk of this being bad for anyone other than the people who were let go is quite premature. I mean come on. They just extended job offers to people who left Irrational. Strange that they're suddenly letting people go after just offering spots to former members of one of the most successful studios of the last generation, isn't it?

I got to agree, not only that but devs themselves are aimming for too much, games get bigger and bigger, the next GTA will come out and Rockstar will anounce "a world 7x bigger than GTA5" and you have this infinite city to explore, seriously thats not needed, we just want fun games, GTA 1 city was like 1/10 of GTA5s and the game was arguably much better, look how simple Mario 3d World is  (when compared to other AAAs) and yet its awesome. Theres no need to go insanely overboard realy, keep it grounded and dont go bankrupt is what I have to say.

I think if something its that the multiplayer mode wasnt as sucessful as they thought. I can see them laying off the multiplayer team. SSM is best known for quality single player. I'm just speculating though.

Another thing to consider, GoW Ascension didnt sell well (it did, just not as well as previous GoWs) but that was like 10 months ago, laying-off ppl now because of that makes no sense.

Layoffs usually means that something is  going wrong, let it be large or small. It can mean that management isn't in an optimal position, they aren't delivering the results needed for a certain amount of employees, or they want to focus more resources into another studio such as Naughty Dog.

Thats why i sugested the multiplayer, because that was supported for a while after launch.

Yeah. My guess is they are simply dropping dead weight, possiby the people who worked on MP. And maybe since they wante to expand they'll hire Irrational employees?

SSM in past few years has done almost nothing, they work was helping others studios.

now they moved to a new building maybe they want to focus on their games. who knows?

they were the biggest studio among the others with only gow on their belt. im not surprised that this happened

EDIT: and yes, gow:a flopped. there is that

This really was unexpected. But so was that Irrational move.
I don`t think thy would fire people to bring in people in (lack of consideration for their own guys).

My guess either this was planned for some time - like the Irrational lay-off - or something bad happened recently that they couldn`t overcome.

Either this layoff is a very different situation from what happened at Irrational or a worrying trend is starting to kick in. And at the start of a generation...

A project from a new set of indies probably didn't hit it's schedule and was subsequently cancelled. I wouldn't think anything big of it. Many studios lay off regularly. We just hear more about it more now because of the web.