Chris Deering, the former President of SCEE from 1995 to 2005, during which time the company launched the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles, recently made an appearance on game writer Simon Parkin’s podcast My Perfect Console, where the topic of the video game industry layoffs came up. Deering said that he doesn’t believe the recent layoffs across the games industry have been result of corporate greed. He says that workers who have lost their jobs should “drive an Uber” or “go to the beach for a year” until things settle down.
“I don’t think it’s fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed,” Deering said. “I always tried to minimise the speed with which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle, and I didn’t want to end up having the same problems that Sony did in electronics.
“Now, of course, there was just recently a big layoff of Sony studios, and in London, but that whole studio setup has been run out of Amsterdam now for a few years, and I don’t know… if the money isn’t coming in from the consumers on the last game, it’s going to be hard to justify spending the money for the next game.
I think it’s probably very painful for the managers, but I don’t think that having skill in this area [game development] is going to be a lifetime of poverty or limitation.
It’s still where the action is, and it’s like the pandemic, but now you’re going to have to take a few… figure out how to get through it. Drive an Uber or whatever, go off to find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.
But keep up with your news and keep up with it, because once you get off the train, it’s much harder.
But I’m optimistic about the future, even for people that have just recently been laid off. And these things do recover sometimes a lot faster than you might think, when all is very precarious.
I presume people were paid some kind of a decent severage package, and by the time that runs out… well, you know, that’s life.”
Deering added: “I always say what’s really exciting about the insutry is that you never really have the chance to get depressed. What you have to do, is things jump out in front of you, and you deal with them, just like in a game. So get over it.
Really, that’s the excitement of the industry that shit like this happens, and it’s very sad, but it’s not going to be forever, and you know, come on guys, wake up. This is not the first time.”
By May 2024, over 10,000 people in the games industry were laid off. As of now, that number has gone up to 11,500.