PlayStation Studio Layoffs Could Hit Unexpected Names This Summer
French investigative journalist Sylvain Trinel broke the news first. While discussing the ongoing layoff situation at Xbox, Trinel suggested a wider wave of restructuring is coming for publisher-owned studios across the industry. He called it a catastrophe, naming Don’t Nod and Quantic Dream specifically as companies at risk in the same breath as PlayStation.
The timing matters here. Xbox has been going through its own round of cuts under CEO Asha Sharma’s brand reset, and Trinel’s comments suggest the industry is bracing for a summer that mirrors what happened at Microsoft. Publishers across the board appear to be tightening budgets at the same time, which makes any single studio’s situation harder to read in isolation.
Media Molecule Is the Name Circulating Most
Sony has not confirmed any specific targets within its own portfolio yet. Media Molecule, the UK studio behind LittleBigPlanet, keeps coming up in speculation. No major release since 2020 and a history of internal restructuring make it an easy guess for anyone trying to predict where cuts might land. The studio has gone through multiple internal shakeups in recent years without shipping anything new, which puts it on most people’s shortlist even without official word from Sony.
Source: PlayStation’s Official Announcement
Bungie and Housemarque Are Probably Not the Targets
A lot of community speculation pointed at Bungie and Housemarque, the studios behind Marathon and Saros. Both studios have been through public struggles recently, which made them obvious guesses for anyone trying to predict where the next round of cuts would land. Trinel shot that down directly, telling people to watch July closely but not necessarily for the studios everyone has been talking about.
That line alone changes the conversation. It suggests the layoffs could land somewhere nobody is currently expecting, rather than hitting the studios already under public scrutiny. Marathon and Saros both carry enough commercial weight right now that pulling resources from either would be a strange move for Sony, even with the company’s recent pattern of cuts.
What This Means for PlayStation’s Smaller Studios
Trinel’s comment shifts attention away from the big-name studios fans assume are vulnerable and toward smaller or quieter teams within Sony’s portfolio. Without official confirmation, every smaller PlayStation studio with a thin release history becomes a candidate by default. That uncertainty is part of what makes this report unsettling for people inside the industry rather than just for fans watching from outside.
This Follows a Brutal Year for PlayStation Studios
London Studio shut down in March, costing 900 employees their jobs in one of the larger single cuts Sony has made in recent memory. Bluepoint Games, known for the Demon’s Souls remake, closed before that. Dark Outlaw Games got cut more recently as part of the same downsizing push. None of these closures happened in isolation. They are part of a pattern that has been running consistently for years now across Sony’s entire studio network.
The Bigger Picture Across the Industry
More than 45,000 gaming jobs have disappeared between 2022 and 2025 industry-wide. Sony’s recent cuts sit inside that larger trend rather than apart from it. Microsoft, Embracer, and several other major publishers have gone through similar waves during the same stretch, which makes this less of a Sony-specific story and more of an industry-wide contraction that keeps repeating itself year after year. Whatever happens in July adds to what is already shaping up as one of the worst stretches in gaming industry history.
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