There has been some serious talk over the last year or so about the state of Sony and what exactly is going to happen to them in the future. In August it was revealed that Sony, as a whole, lost $312 million for Q1 2012, with around $45 million of that attributed to their gaming division. This then led to the shutdown of their game studio in Liverpool and followed the shutdown of Zipper Interactive and BigBig Studios. The layoffs and cutbacks should come as no shock if you’ve been following Sony this year, as they announced way back in April that they would be shedding somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 jobs over the course of the year, including around 3,000 – 4,000 in Japan.
Today there are further details on their cutbacks, with an announced 2,000 employees to be pushed into “early retirement.” It looks like a lens factory in Minokamo will be closed, which accounts for 840 employees, and that the Sony home offices in Japan will see a 20% reduction in staff, which is quite sizeable when you imagine how many people they employ there. There was no real talk of which division would see more, but usually when there are across-the-board cuts like this within a company, any division that has been losing money will have to offer up heads for the chopping block, and the gaming division has been losing money, so put two-and-two together on that one.
Hopefully Sony gets their stuff together and fast, as the PlayStation brand is one of the strongest ones in gaming and many are eagerly awaiting the announcement for Sony’s next generation console, which could help revitalize their gaming division. Sony’s PlayStation 3 has indeed been “number three” in this current generation, but has been neck-and-neck with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and both have come anywhere close to Nintendo’s Wii.
[Source: TheNextWeb]
