“It was tough waking up to messages that many friends and former coworkers from PlayStation Visual Arts were laid off this morning,” wrote LeMaster. “The layoffs today hit hard. PSVA let go of developers with decades of subject matter expertise, talent that will be extraordinarily difficult to recoup. This industry can be unpredictable, but the skill, experience, and passion of the people I worked with at PSVA are undeniable.”

According to Kotaku, these layoffs are the result of quite a few in-development PlayStation projects having been cancelled. This includes the open world live-service game that was under development at Bend Studio. However, the report indicates that the layoffs have been quite widespread.

PlayStation Visual Arts is a support studio that helped other internal projects at PlayStation by working on art assets, as well as offering technical support. The studio has in the past worked with Naughty Dog on The Last of Us Part 1.

Several projects at PlayStation have been cancelled recently. Along with Bend’s game, The Last of Us Online, a multiplayer game based on Marvel’s Spider-Man, and even a reboot of Twisted Metal were some of the cancelled projects.

Recently, a rumour indicated that the reboot of Twisted Metal would have been a battle royale game that would feature a mix of the series’ traditional vehicular combat along with on-foot third-person shooter combat. The game was also seemingly being developed using Unreal Engine 5.

Reports have indicated that several of live service titles were cancelled due to the catastrophic failure of multiplayer shooter Concord. The game, released last year, saw its servers shut down in less than a month of its original release.

Sony has stated that, while it has been cancelling a few projects, it won’t be closing down any of its studios.

“Bend and Bluepoint are highly accomplished teams who are valued members of the PlayStation Studios family, and we are working closely with each studio to determine what are the next projects,” said a Sony spokesperson earlier this year.

These recent cancellations and layoffs have run counter to Sony’s plans back in 2023, when it intended to release 12 live service games before April 2026. At the time, this included multiplayer games across various Sony franchises, including Horizon and the since-cancelled The Last of Us.

Shuhei Yoshida has spoken about this push for live-service games that Sony had after leaving the company earlier this year. In an interview, he spoke about how he would have pushed back against PlayStation going so heavily into live-service games, since the company’s success has largely come about thanks to its single-player releases.

This information comes from employee John Borba, who was, until recently, project coordinator at the studio. Taking to LinkedIn, Borba revealed that he was among several people at PlayStation Visual Arts who were recently let go “to support the new budgetary needs” following “a large pivot” on a AAA multiplayer title that the studio had been working on.

Borba has not named the project in question, though presumably, he is referring to Naughty Dog’s standalone multiplayer The Last of Us game. Recent reports claimed that following an internal reevaluation, Sony had decided to scale down the project. Naughty Dog said in an official statement at the same time that it needed more time to work on the game before formally unveiling it.

At the same time, the AAA multiplayer game being referred to could also be Deviation Games’ PS5 title, which, according to recent reports, has been cancelled following the studio being hit with a round of layoffs.