Insomniac Games leaks reveal that Sony pressured the studio to cut budgets by laying off employees.

Leaks from Insomniac Games show that Sony has pressured the studio. Moreover, in order to cut costs, he has to lay off quite a few employees. Layoffs at game studios were among the biggest video game news of 2023. So it’s no surprise to see more mentions of this unfortunate trend.

Hackers who breached Insomniac Games’ database earlier this week released about 1.67 TB of confidential data related to the company’s future.

This massive leak included information about Insomniac’s next five games, among other things. Among them are unannounced titles such as an X-Men game coming out in 2030. As part of the leaked information, we also found many details about the upcoming Wolverine game. Among them is the alpha PC build of the title. Now, as people dig deeper into these leaks, more and more information is surfacing.

Some files revealed that Sony pressured Insomniac Games to reduce the budget. According to IGN, Sony asked the company to cut around 50-75 people from the studio. He suggested cutting out the teams from the upcoming Wolverine and Spider-Man 3 and replacing them with members of Ratchet and Clank. The layoffs were partly because Sony was worried about the studio’s rising development costs. The mammoth company was concerned that Spider-Man 2 cost about $30 million more than the original budget. That made it $270 million, and more than 7 million units would have to be sold to make it profitable.

Since the game is said to have sold more than 5 million units in the first two weeks after its release, it is likely that this limit will be reached by Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

The leaked documents also reveal that Sony tried to cut staff from several other first-party studios. Of course, names were not officially released. Looking back at the layoffs at some of Sony’s internal studios, you may notice that the Visual Arts Group fired several senior designers back in October. Meanwhile, Media Molecule cut its workforce from 135 to 115 around the same time.

2023 was a challenging year for the gaming industry. Many excellent games, such as Baldur’s Gate 3, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Alan Wake 2, were released in 2023. However, a lot of developers were laid off. Big names like Unity have laid off a total of more than 1,100 employees in four rounds of layoffs between 2022 and 2023. Others, such as ByteDance, have laid off 1,000 people. And the Embracer Group let go of about 950 workers. Companies such as BioWare, Riot Games, Take-Two Interactive, CD Projekt Red and Electronic Arts have also downsized, showing how widespread the trend is in the gaming industry.

Source: IGN