Sucker Punch, the Sony-owned studio behind Ghost Of Tsushima and Ghost Of Yotei, is the latest developer of critically acclaimed games to face layoffs.
According to an ex-Sucker Punch employee to whom Aftermath spoke, 26 people have been let go. In an email to staff viewed by Aftermath,
The game was well-received, sold multiple millions of copies, and was said to have a very sane development budget.
I really don’t think it did. By any back of the napkin math anyone can come up with, this game made plenty of money on PlayStation. To me, it looks like Sony covering losses (or even just diminished profits) elsewhere by spreading the bad news around to studios that did well in their own right.
Sorry my comment wasn’t super well written, but what I meant was: Sony stops PC sales for super popular game thinking they’ll sell more playstations. Playstation prices go up because of ram so now they’re neither selling playstations or the pc port. In order to recoup their losses from their shit business decision they go after whatever they can to suck the marrow, and sucker punch is next on the list. I was implying that if they had let the studio work on the PC port they likely would have made far more money of its sales and perhaps this wouldn’t have happened to the studio.
Because of their poor marketing efforts, like putting out PC ports at random years-long delays after the fact and still at full price, they actually made very little from most of their PC ports, so there’s not much money left on the table relative to what they were making before. I think this was going to happen to this studio regardless. Everyone is tightening their belts.
I really don’t think it did. By any back of the napkin math anyone can come up with, this game made plenty of money on PlayStation. To me, it looks like Sony covering losses (or even just diminished profits) elsewhere by spreading the bad news around to studios that did well in their own right.
Sorry my comment wasn’t super well written, but what I meant was: Sony stops PC sales for super popular game thinking they’ll sell more playstations. Playstation prices go up because of ram so now they’re neither selling playstations or the pc port. In order to recoup their losses from their shit business decision they go after whatever they can to suck the marrow, and sucker punch is next on the list. I was implying that if they had let the studio work on the PC port they likely would have made far more money of its sales and perhaps this wouldn’t have happened to the studio.
Because of their poor marketing efforts, like putting out PC ports at random years-long delays after the fact and still at full price, they actually made very little from most of their PC ports, so there’s not much money left on the table relative to what they were making before. I think this was going to happen to this studio regardless. Everyone is tightening their belts.