With more than 61 million copies sold, Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-selling titles of all time, but good luck getting it to run on your PS5 any better than the resolution and frame rate designed for its original PS4 edition. For years now, fans have been begging Rockstar to give the open worlder an update to make it run a bit better on Sony's current console — as it does on Xbox Series X — and as an unexpected patch actually does arrive 18 months after the last one, of course there's no sign of current-gen support.
What led to Sony laying off 900 people? | This Week in Business
01.03.2024 - 17:29 / gamesindustry.biz / Hiroki Totoki / Sony
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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
Sony Interactive Entertainment this week announced plans to cut 900 workers from the PlayStation payroll, or about 8% of its global workforce.
In and of itself, this is a sadly common bit of news. Already this year we've seen Electronic Arts take the axe to 5% of staff, while Supermassive cut about 26%, Wildlife Studios dropped 21%, Deck Nine Games trimmed 20%, Radical Forge shed a handful of staff, Cloud Imperium Games laid off an unknown number, and Die Gute Fabrik basically called it quits, halting production until it finds funding in some unspecified future timeframe.
Wait, that was all just this week? Well at least the year's almost over, right?
Just as it's easy to lose sight of the human cost of a layoff once the numbers get big enough, it's tempting to stop considering these as decisions taken by individual companies for varying reasons and just gesture in the direction of interest rates or "the economy" as the reason why all these people had to lose their jobs.
And sure, that has an impact. But Sony's not Unity or Embracer or one of these companies you watch floundering and say, "Yeah, that sounds about right."
Sony's a consistently profitable market leader riding the success of the PS5 and a blockbuster line up of hits both expected (Spider-Man 2) and otherwise (Helldivers 2). So why the layoffs?
Well, as Sony president Hiroki Totoki explained in the company's recent financial earnings report, the PlayStation business is profitable, but not profitable enough.
STAT | 5.8% - Sony's projected profit margin for the Game and Network Services division for fiscal year 2023, which ends March 31, 2024. It will be the third straight year of declines, coming down from 6.9% in FY22, 12.6% in FY21, and 12.9% in FY20.
That's not a great trend in a vacuum, but it could be worse. For example, let's compare the above numbers – the first four years of the PS5 generation – with the gaming division's performance at the start of the PS4 generation.
STAT | -1%, 3.5%, 5.7%, 8.2% - In order, the profit margins from Sony's FY13, FY14, FY15, and FY16.
For the start of a console generation when the hardware is being sold at a loss and actively hurting the bottom line, it actually looks like the PS5 years have been pretty amazing for Sony.
The trend may be going in the wrong direction, but I think the pandemic might have had a hand in making the early PS5 years as profitable as they were. And in the past three
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