PlayStation Hit With More Layoffs Following Recent Game Cancellations
The PlayStation-owned studio Visual Arts was hit with fresh layoffs this week amid a further restructuring of Sony's U.S. game development operations. While some of the cuts included staff who had contributed to recently canceled projects like an upcoming live-service game at Bend Studio, a source told Kotaku the layoffs were more widespread than that.
Earlier this week, an unknown number of staff at the Visual Arts group based out of San Diego were informed that their last day at Sony would be March 7. The team provides internal art and technical support to first-party PlayStation studios, and worked closely with Naughty Dog on the recent Last of Us Part 1 and 2 remasters among other projects.
Sony did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
'It was tough waking up to messages that many friends and former coworkers from PSVA were laid off this morning,' former PSVA project manager Abby LeMaster, now at Riot Games, posted on LinkedIn on Monday. '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.'
The layoffs come after an expensive failure in last year's Concord, new rounds of live-service project cancellations including a reported God of War spin-off at BluePoint Games, and a reorganization within the top echelons of Sony leadership. In January, Hiroki Totoki became the company's new CEO and Hideaki Nishino became the sole CEO of PlayStation, with Hermen Hulst, who had previously been co-CEO, reporting to him as the ongoing head of PlayStation Studios.
The latest cuts at the PlayStation Studios Visual Arts group follow an emerging trend of game companies pulling back development resources from expensive U.S.-based offices. Last year during a business briefing, Hulst said there had been 'pressure on the cost side' as Sony laid off hundreds amid spiraling first-party blockbuster game development budgets.
'For every title, we have really rigorous review processes where we focus on the sustainability of our investments in these titles,' he said at the time. 'We include areas such as looking at what can be outsourced, for example, to avoid too high peak resource on development teams because costs can be sticky. We're looking at co-development options in areas where the costs per resource is maybe somewhat lower than the average or on the American west coast.'
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Yahoo
13 hours ago
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Can Gaelic football finally have its video game hit?
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Unfortunately, in my experience, this visual artifact tends to be more noticeable than the off-axis tint detailed above. This is because it tends to rear its head during any dark scene with low color saturation. In other words, a background wall doesn't need to be gray for the discoloration to appear. Black-and-white content will bring it out almost immediately. Much like the off-axis color tinting, this problem affects OLED TVs seemingly at random. However, not once have I seen the issue manifest on quantum dot-enhanced OLEDs like Samsung's excellent flagship, the S95D OLED TV. This leads me to believe that QD-OLEDs aren't as susceptible to the root cause. In my experience, QD-OLED TVs like the Samsung S95D tend to exhibit fewer visual quirks than TVs with WOLED panels. The S95D (one of our favorite OLEDs of its year) delivers an incredible picture and a sensational suite of features for gaming, streaming and beyond. To check your OLED TV for this issue, switch off your lights and, on your OLED, pull up this Dirty Screen Effect YouTube video uploaded by Sunil Raman. This short clip will start with a 100% black screen and gradually move up the grayscale until it displays 100% white. The dark gray-colored slides at 5% to 20% are particularly useful at coaxing out the pink tint. As far as I know, if you do discover pink-colored blotches, it can't be addressed outside of replacing the TV. Above is a close-up of a QD-OLED TV panel displaying a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. If you look along the edges of the black squares, you'll notice green- and magenta-colored rows of pixels. This is a result of QD-OLED's triangular subpixel structure, which places the green subpixel above red and blue. Fortunately, this minor, near-imperceptible color fringing is not a substantial mark against QD-OLED TVs. 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In the past, when I've reached out to LG about one of its TVs exhibiting this banding, a representative has recommended that I run the display's pixel refresher. Known as Pixel Cleaning on LG OLEDs (or Pixel Refresh on Samsung OLEDS), this process automatically adjusts the luminance of pixels depending on whether or not an unevenness is detected. Be warned, however: I would not manually run these pixel-cleaning features with any regularity. They can be aggressive over time — akin to scouring your display — and there's a good chance your OLED TV is already running a lighter, preventative version of the feature automatically when it's off. If none of these measures eliminates the TV's banding issue, I would brush up on the warranty and reach out to customer service. Burn-in is the only one of these issues that happens as a direct result of how an OLED TV is used. It describes the ghostly image of previously viewed content, now embedded within the display after many hours of use. Due to the organic nature of OLED displays, they're particularly susceptible to burn-in — or at least they were. Burn-in was something of an OLED boogeyman in the early days of the technology, but brands have built up plenty of defense against the issue in the years since. For instance, all major OLED-makers offer a pixel-shifting feature that occasionally (and subtly) moves the picture to ensure that each pixel is switching things up from time to time. The aforementioned pixel refreshing cycle remains an option, too, if you're noticing some image retention taking place. In general, the OLED TVs of today are far better equipped to prevent burn-in than earlier models. In general, the OLED TVs of today are far better equipped to prevent burn-in than earlier models. However, it still wouldn't hurt to give your TV a rest every now and then, particularly if you play games with static HUDs, or watch content with chyrons and/or tickers. If your OLED TV is exhibiting burn-in, it might be covered by the brand's standard warranty. LG, for instance, offers a one-year warranty on most of its OLED TVs which ought to cover burn-in, but the likelihood that you'll be dealing with OLED burn-in that soon is very, very low. Personally, I wouldn't let the prospect of burn-in stop me from shopping for an OLED TV. Nor would I let any of these issues dissuade me. The truth is, no TV is perfect — regardless of display technology. Due to the nature of their hardware, OLED TVs certainly need to be coddled a bit more relative to their LCD/LED counterparts, but those TVs come with their own potential quirks, too.
