After announcing the new era of the PS Plusa Sony laid off about 90 employees of its games division in the United States. The terminations were all related to the North American sales and marketing sectors of the PlayStation.
The information was disclosed by journalist Stephen Totillo, from the website Axis, who revealed the closure of the sales division responsible for direct contact with retailers and physical media merchants. Among the main responsibilities of the dismissed employees were activities such as visiting physical stores, promoting the brand’s products to shopkeepers and even teaching about PlayStation products and services to the establishment’s employees.
According to the website, employees in the marketing area were also laid off, also related to activities involving physical media stores, with the staff cuts being labeled by the company as part of a “global transformation”. This change seems to be strongly influenced by the change in the world scenario in relation to the consumption of digital media, driven by the pandemic.
PlayStation didn’t just close out Sony’s fiscal year by buying a game studio and revising its subscription plan
It also just quietly laid off dozens of workers in its sales and marketing teams as part of a “global transformation” of how it does business https://t.co/TRXuap3T33
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) March 31, 2022
According to market analysis website Statista, more than 60% of PlayStation game sales at the end of last year were traded directly to consumers through digital media. With PSN sales representing more than half of the total revenue generated in the period, Sony’s new strategy seems to be to skip the middleman (in this case, physical media stores), focusing its efforts on digital releases.
Also according to Axios, one of the fired employees said that Sony did not offer the possibility for the affected employees to be reassigned to other teams. In fact, the shutdowns would have happened suddenly, without warning. So far, only PlayStation’s US offices have been affected by the company’s strategic shift.
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