Sucker Punch Layoffs and What it Means

Sucker Punch is laying off staff, and the obvious question is whether Ghost of Yotei underperformed. The numbers say it did not.

Breaking. Aftermath first reported that Sucker Punch, the studio behind Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei, is cutting around 26 people.

Here is the internal email. After carefully observing the challenges in the market and reviewing the team needs for our next project, we’ve decided to make some staffing reductions. Several positions across Sucker Punch will be eliminated as a result. We know this is a lot to take in and we want to assure you that we did not make this decision lightly. We have given this a lot of attention and work to support our affected colleagues during this transition as well as we can. There’s no getting around that this is a hard day. Next week we’ll go into more details about the future.

That last line is the daunting part.

The question I had recording this was whether the game underperformed. It is a fair question. I was tracking the sales and it seemed to be doing all right despite the backlash it got over the protagonist change. I was fair to this series because Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favorite games of all time, and I had a lot of fun with Legends.

Here is what the record actually shows. Sony CFO Lin Tao said on an earnings call that Ghost of Yotei exceeded the sales of the previous title in the same period of time. Tsushima did around 5 million in 128 days back in 2020. Yotei did over 3.3 million in 32 days. Sony has also pointed to the game significantly contributing to its financial results.

So this does not look like a flop being punished. It looks like something else.

Which matters, because we have been watching layoffs sweep across industries that run on their technical departments, with companies betting they can be more efficient using new technology. I have wondered how that was going to land on games. This could be part of it.

But notice the wording. They said challenges in the market. That is not the language of an efficiency problem. That reads like uncertainty in the market itself, and a studio looking at it and deciding to slim down.

I do not knock them for making that call. That is the nature of the business, and it is a hard email to have to send.

What I do not know is what they were projecting. When you staff up and plan for the future you are going off projections, and your financing moves with them. Five million looks significant until you find out they were banking on something bigger. You are not only measuring yourself against the market and your competitors. You are measuring against yourself and what you expected.

Let me know what you think.