In April 2023, Sony was delighted to announce the acquisition of the Firewalks studio. A year later, the giant threw the buyout in the trash along with the employees concerned.
“ Let’s welcome Firewalk Studios to the PlayStation Studios family “. This was what Hermen Hulst, then boss of PlayStation Studios, wrote in April 2023 when announcing the takeover of Firewalk Studios.
The boss then had the “advantage and honor” of announcing this merger: “ Firewalk is home to a remarkable team of creative talents who have helped launch some of the most celebrated gaming experiences “. PlayStation was full of praise for its new gem: “ we never ceased to be impressed by the team’s ambitions “.
In October 2024, the time is no longer for ambition. Hermen Hulst, now co-CEO of PlayStation, announces “ we had to make a difficult decision regarding two of our studios – Neon Koi and Firewalk Studios “.
Empty thanks
Firewalk released the multiplayer game at the end of summer Concord. A commercial oven like you rarely see in video games. The game reportedly only sold some 25,000 copies, and had less than a thousand players on its servers. To the point where Sony decided to discontinue marketing
In an internal email, also published on the Sony Interactive websiteHermen Hulst does not forget to “ thank all the members of Firewalk for their know-how, their creative spirit and their dedication “. A dedication and a creative spirit visibly too insufficient to justify continuing to pay the 172 employees concerned.
Same story for the Neon Koi studio, which was working on a mobile game. The latter will not even have the chance to see the light of day on the application stores: “ I would like to express my gratitude to the entire Neon Koi team for their hard work and inexhaustible passion for innovation “. An inexhaustible passion, except when we decided to close the development studio and its team of 38 people.
The crisis continues
The video game crisis continues. More than 13,000 employees lost their jobs in the industry in 2024, not counting the waves of layoffs in previous years. Many studios have seen their doors close, notably at Xbox and PlayStation.
Workers continue to unionize in more and more companies and make their demands known. In a few weeks, the Spiders and Ubisoft studios in France saw their workforce on strike. The Don’t Nod studio is also looking gloomy in its Parisian branch.
