For the past two years, the video game industry has been going through a rather delicate crisis, which can easily be compared to the video game crash in 1983. This first crisis had clearly almost made this young industry disappear. Since then, gaming has experienced a meteoric rise, becoming the world's leading industry, generating even more money than cinema and music combined (which are the second and third largest entertainment industries).
What will save gaming in 2025 is precisely this status. Today, video games are no longer a new, growing and fragile medium. Unfortunately, this is also why the crisis we are going through is so violent. After the increase in numbers and the positive effect of Covid on the purchase of consoles, games and the launch of many new projects, the various studios, publishers and manufacturers are taking the full brunt of the fallout with bad bets, bad investments and many projects that do not work or are even canceled.
This gives us an unprecedented crisis with more than 25,000 layoffs in less than two years, many games canceled and quite a few studios closed. Today, we learn that PlayStation has just laid off staff at the Visual Arts premises. Even worse fate for the Ballistic Moon studio (which does not belong to Sony) but which developed the remake of Until Dawn on PS5. The studio has just been closed.
Video games, still in crisis in 2025
Sony/PlayStation has quietly carried out a wave of layoffs among its Visual Arts workforce. We have just learned thanks to our colleagues at Kotaku, as well as a post on the LinkedIn of Abby LeMaster, a former Visual Arts employee, who has been experiencing numerous layoffs this week:
Visual Arts is a studio specializing in in animations and artistic works. The studio does not have its own projects and will mainly help with the development of PlayStation Studios games. Apparently, a large part of its layoffs result from the recent cancellation of games like the multiplayer God of War at Bluepoint Games, but also the cancellation of the Bend Studio project at the beginning of the year.
At the same time, we learned that the Ballistic Moon studio, to which we owe the remake of Until Danw last October, has literally been closed. This time, it is Insider-Gaming who confirms the information. In September 2024, the studio experienced a first wave of layoffs, then a second one last December with 20 additional posts that were deleted. At the beginning of this year, the few developers who remained were visibly thanked, leading to the closure of the studio. An official announcement should be made in the coming hours or days.
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