Just different employee laws, it’s not Nintendo being some good guys, as is evident with the lack of mass layoffs at Japanese publishers so far. They have their own shit when it comes to employees though.
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Nintendo hasn’t had ballooning development costs and still sees very good sales. I don’t think there’d be any reason for them to have layoffs.
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Pulling Wii U in this gen would be a natural disaster. It will be far worse than its actual event.
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I know layoffs suck, but the reactions across the board is very interesting. When the Microsoft layoffs happened the media wanted Microsoft’s head, and you had devs, gamers, and the media creating thinkpieces about it. Meanwhile, with the Sony layoffs the attitude across the board is much different and took quicker for it to calm down. Also, there’s a difference when talking about the EA ones too where people are angry about EA and you go to a website like IGN and you’ll see more articles about that than the Playstation one.
Anyway, these layoff sucks, and hopefully it makes these companies reflect and go back to AA and AA.5 type of games because not every game needs to be a massive open world game and most games shouldn’t take 5+ years to make because it really makes most games make or break imo. I think Sony does have to worry about their audience expecting expensive AAA games because they’ve trained their audience to behave that only those games matter.
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EA has been doing some AA for a while. I think the real problem based on their statement is licensed games. They’re likely eating chunk of their profit and with little to no return in doing so, they want to focus on their own projects, which I’m fine but wish it didn’t result to cancellation, closure, and layoff.
I don’t know what’s Sony’s mission, but it’s highly suggested to be more PC games and mobile push. PC release has mixed result when it comes to old PS5 titles. It started promising but then it varies and not in a promising way. Day and date could work, but if we were to believe Xbox’s philosophy to be true, they have to be ready for PS5 sale drop. If anything, they badly need a launcher to get the profit.
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I think Sony’s goal was to create small standalone games to go along with their major releases. They were planning to make two miles morales level of Spiderman games based off of spiderman 2. I think that plan could be changed, but that might be their plan development wise
Also, on PC I think they’ll make a push, but I can see them creating a storefront because they most likely want to test out if PC gamers would buy from Sony directly rather than Steam. I think they should at least test that out and see how it works
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Yes, it will be interesting to see how many Japanese Devs were part of Sony’s layoffs considering they are also a Japanese company.
From what I understand it mostly hit the UK & US.
Not sure their own PC store is worth the expense - PC gamers are very protective of Steam as Epic has discovered, and Sony fans would already have a PS5…
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Seems reasonable. To a certain extent I can see platform holders like PlayStation and Microsoft putting up with expensive license fees if they make the call that those games might encourage people to join their eco system, but without that possibility it seems working on your own IP is a better use of resources.
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That’s true, most likely better to lose the 30% than to maintain a storefront. I am curious if their IPs are strong enough where people will use their storefront over Steam .
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Having their own storefront also allows for them to roll services out to PC though
Yep, Sony have created this problem for themselves going forward.
If they go for anything less than AAA it will seem like a disappointment and they are typically short games (short engagement) which are difficult to monetize (have to keep initial sell price high).
Many of their recent games have drifted to a light RPG model which helps lengthen player engagement but they are still in the same hole.
Unless they can get a hit live service game they will continue to struggle, especially as most people tend to to spend their time in a singular 3rd party game (Fortnite, Minecraft, COD, FIFA & GTA) and not playing their first party titles.
Bungie should have been their hail mary but that doesn’t seem to have worked out (Marathon looks like a flop to me) and I’m pretty certain Helldivers 2 will also fizzle out soon.
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The hypocrisy around the way places like IGN, forums, social media cretins have reacted to the same news from MS and Sony is as hilarious as it is disgusting. I think my favourite one is on neogaf, where one Sony warrior was so upset that they are struggling he wants people to start voluntarily paying more for their games ha ha… amazing.
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I japan I believe they “legally” have to do this since the majority of Nintendo is in the Japanese section they can’t fire them to save stock face.
In Japan if you fire someone you have to use company resources to find them a new job… So they have to find different ways to save money.
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Yes. It’s basically the exact same group of people who spent 7 years screaming about Gamepass being ‘unsustainable’ who now want people to pay more to protect the clearly unsustainable model of their favorite corporation.
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It’s been mentioned but this irony is pretty ridiculous.
All the years of people spouting about Gamepass being unsustainable and ruining the industry and it turns out it was Sony’s AAAA over priced and over budget Sad dad walking sims that was the unsustainable business model and not Gamepass.
Sony has curated their nutty fanbase to only think AAAA 3rd person games are the REAL games and everything else is just filler. When Sony pivots even further away from that the nutty fanbase will eventually crack and go on to something else.
Also another good decision by Xbox was to STAY OUT of console VR. Phil 100% made the right choice to wait and see on that.
I have a Quest 3 and enjoy VR but VR tethered to a console was DOA and Sony were idiots to go forward with it being way over priced, no PC support and very little first party support.
Consoles sales or not Sony has bungled this gen trying to stretch their AAAA business model in an era where that is not going to fly, and wasting time money and dev resources going forward with console VR only to dump support when it did not fly off the shelves instantly.
Sony is closing studios while their main studios are stuck after years of working on GAAS with little results and now a pivot away from GAAS will put them years behind trying to restart non GAAS projects for their studios.
I would not want to be a person that has their entire game library attached to Sony, things are not going to go well in the far future and no amount of console sales will save them.
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Right now MS and Xbox ae looking pretty good lately, so many studios, so many games coming out they are giving some older games to other platforms to help them out 
MS putting some games on PS5 while Sony are in a drought is pretty funny considering the trolling last gen
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Sony fans have always seen Sony as some sort of charity that they WANT to throw money at. With the low margins Sony has seems they need to step it up a bit.
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To expand on that, what Nintendo did was not through any goodwill of their own but because it had to be done according to their employment laws.
There is considerable case law that makes it necessary to meet the following four criteria for dismissal of employees in order to reduce staff numbers as a result of deteriorating business performance:
Necessity
The company must prove that layoffs are unavoidable and necessary to the business.
Effort to avoid layoffs
The company must prove that it has taken measures to prevent layoffs such as re-assigning staff and advertising for voluntary opportunities.
Reasonable selection
The company must prove that layoff standards were fair, objective, and reasonable.
Reasonable process
The company must prove that it held acceptable consultations with workers and labor unions.
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I will be sad if MM molecule is closed in the next years (it seems sony is closing a studio per year). I have fond memories of playing LBP with my brother and friends and was one of my most played games on ps3 
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