Sony Interactive Entertainment put dozens of staff up for redundancy in Europe on the same day it made the announcement regarding the launch of the PlayStation 5.
If you're going to give your employees notice, the best time to do it would be on the very day you publish anticipated and exciting news as the latter would overshadow. We can't accuse Sony of being that calculated and taking advantage of their reveal date as we simply can't know that was indeed the case, but it appears to have worked anyhow.
Persons in the know have disclosed that the American PlayStation directors visited Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe (SIEE) in London on Tuesday to inform staff of the restructuring of multiple divisions, including marketing and PR.
The employees affected by said change were given notice and others were told to attend meetings to be re-interviewed for their jobs.
The layoffs weren't restricted to London, however, as the US-based creative services team was affected by the move to. One employee would tweet that they hated the fact that news of the layoffs would be "drowned by the PS5 announcement."
Sony Interactive Entertainment America (SIEA) has grown in influence over the past year and the company is now aiming for a centralized global structure.
PlayStation's different arms were allowed to go about their affairs on their own, signing their own games and dealing with their markets in a structure that saw regional departments given the ability to target specific audiences. For eg., while PlayStation Move was paid particular attention to in Europe, Driveclub was marketed heavily in the US. As a result, group operations weren't really synced and some third-party publishers were left frustrated.
The latest move sees SIEA take the lead globally, which means Europe now has to take orders from the American branch.
SIEE has been a key part of operations since the PSOne and is responsible for mass-market brands like Wipeout, LittleBigPlanet, Killzone, SingStar, EyeToy, as well as a large section of PlayStation's VR. But, according to the source, the branch's employees reckon that the influence will be reduced.
It's even claimed that SIEE was not even aware of the US's decision to announce PS5 plans until they came across already-published articles. Additionally, the State of Play live streams normally come from the American side of things and their European counterparts are often out of the loop.
The centralizing has resulted in lots of layoffs across Europe over the last year, with this week's redundancies coming as the latest blow. It has also seen a number of senior staff members quit.
Source: VGC