According to glassdoor data gathered on Resetera, Sony Firesprite is in disarray. Over 100 people have left since the acquisition, the founders and creative leads have jumped ship after recieving their golden parachute, the culture is being dismantled piece by piece, projects are in dev hell, and there is no direction in the studio.

Ruh roh......

https://www.resetera.com/threads/playstation-studios-ot38-i-have-nothing-left-except-spider-man.773426/page-147#post-114230051

Just the current state of Firesprite according to what you can read online. You can hear stuff like:

-Management/leadership since Sony took over is awful. The last shipped project (Horizon VR?) was a nightmare to work with.

-The Sony acquisition has negatively impacted many departments. Since the acquisition they have lost over 100 employees and had Firesprite culture dismantled piece by piece. Sony implemented a hiring pause that put pressure on several teams and caused many staff to have complete burnout.

-Founders jumped ship after they got their golden parachutes (after the Firesprite and Fabrik Games acquisition).

-People are afraid to even give input on their own work and disappear if they challenge the new studio heads.

-Understaffed projects that are often poorly managed.

-Projects in development hell.

-Chaotic production on almost every project. Resulting in wasted time and people running around like headless chickens crunching to get stuff in last minute. Lack of clear direction in many projects. Too many leads/directors (especially after the Sony acquisition). They bite off more than they can chew resulting in cancelled projects. All projects are understaffed resulting on a lot of people getting moved from project to project.

- Management and many employees have limited experience with Unreal Engine and a certain project is suffering as a result. Unlikely to ship.

Remember Pete Ellis?The former Naughty Dog dev who went to Firesprite to work as a game director for their narrative-driven horror game?He left this month.

The same goes for the lead designerwho worked on Horizon Call of the Mountain. Gone.

Over 100 developers left since Sony bought them, game development is chaotic and projects are getting canceled. The Sony acquisition has had a negative impact on the culture and leadership. Before the acquisition there were pretty much only positive reviews on Glassdoor.

Doesn't sound good.

Sounds like mismanagement. When Sony kept saying all these devs MS acquired all secretly hate xbox and all will get vested and leave the second their contracts are up, that sounds like they were talking about themselves, and their own situation.

You hear alot about "Xbox mismanagement" but to be honest, you dont see anything like this happening at Obsidian, or InXile, or Playground, or Ninja Theory. Or Double Fine, or Compulsion Games. Or even BGS. If you follow any of the leads from these companies on social media, they all seem pretty happy to be part of Xbox. People at Activision were screaming and cheering with signs when Phil visited Blizzard a week or so ago. What on earth is happening at Sony?

The hits keep coming 🤣

Michael Sechrist - Composer

Holy fucking shit they fired Michael Salvatori.

The senior most audio director, and basically one of the only legacy people left. So with Marty O'Donnell gone, and now this, the entire legendary composer/audio directorship team is now gone. They worked on every single Bungie game from Myth all the way to Destiny 2 (Destiny 1 in Marty's case). It is quite difficult to quantify how much these two are responsible for the identity of Bungie, Destiny, and of course, Halo.

How monumentally stupid Sony is for this lol 😂

Meh......roughly a million people on Xbox alone paid $32 to play a "free" (to them) game they already had entitlements to 6 days early. They'll be fine.

2.5 mil in 24 hours.....

So........roughly in the neighborhood of an Xbox 360 era Gears of War 24 hour launch .......

In an era that was basically entirely physical retail and midnight launch based, vs the contemporary industry realities PS5 enjoys now, like completely normalized (and predominant) digital retail, preloading, and a bigger and more active games industry in general.

NOIICE.

yea, I'm gonna go ahead and put the clown makeup on for not just waiting 2-3 months lol. Oh well, at least they were both half price.

I bought both Like A Dragon: Ishin and Dead Space remake on Xbox in the last few months, and haven't booted either of them up yet, lol.

🤡🤡🤡

One of my criticisms of the Elite controller is that its an Xbox One controller, so its still using the Xbox One's trash D-pad instead of the perfect updated one in the standard Series X controller.

They need to hurry up and put out the Gen 3 version.

So I finally got around to getting Tears of the Kingdom a few days ago, and haven't started it yet.

After like 5 years, I only made it like 6 hours into Breath of the Wild, before putting it down. Should I even bother going back to finish Breath of the Wild, first?

IIRC, the game has to be out for 5 days before it begins tracking on Xbox's most played chart. Considering it was trending on twitter even higher/faster than High On Life (which reached #3 on Xbox most played), and currently #4 on Steam, you can expect it to also be touching shoulders with Fortnite/Cod/GTA/Apex/ in the next couple days.