Rumour: Oblivion Remastered, Metal Gear Solid Delta Dev Hit with Hundreds of Layoffs

So this is their thanks for working on two highly anticipated remakes?

This is tragic. Oblivion Remaster has been a blast, despite being the worst kept secret before launch. And MGS Delta is still my most anticipated release this year. That being said, this does sound like the whole situation was mishandled by their management. Go figure...

@Pacific Job security is huge. Thinking you might lose your livelihood at any minute must be crippling.

@Oram77 Not excusing unnecessary layoffs, but given the size of Virtuous, it's entirely possible that the people affected never even touched either Oblivion or MGS.

@wildcat_kickz Fair point, it was more a poke at the industry as a whole, you do the work (pretty well from the looks of things) but still get layed off, just seems very cruel.

Edit: Was actually very surprised to learn they have a 4k work force!

How can they have the same number of employees as PlayStation Studios? I understand they do multiple projects at a time, but PlayStation Studios is like 20 games at a time size.

4,000 does sound like too many employees in this economy.
Sorry - just being honest.

Well, we can be sure Quality control and playtesting weren’t hit by the layoffs. There was clearly nobody in those departments to begin with.

Ah I see so because the management and executives didn't negotiate properly Devs are getting fired.....again.

Overspent and still delivered a broken product. Embarrassing.

@LifeGirl It makes you wonder what their job roles were, can't believe they were all essential programmers, artists etc. I mean look at small studios like those behind Clair Obscur who delivered a polished product with a very small team.

So Microsoft make money on the game they made and with the cuts from them it's now effecting others. Just look at Romero's company

This might simply be because work on Oblivion, MGS and the Cyberpunk patch is mostly done and they let go an amount of ppl they hired for these projects. If that would be the case then its hardly newsworthy, still sucks for the ppl involved and hope they get hired for another studio soon.

@Nalim pretty much this they bring in extra staff to finish projects off and they get laid off after , on the bonus side I’m pretty sure they can get unemployment between jobs if they want it because they were laid off.

Some one needs to inquire as to why MS cut 9000 positions, and then turned around and applied for 6000+ H-1B visas.
I totally understand trimming the fat... but this???

This is just plain mismanagement by the higher-ups. This also makes more performance patches unlikely if the Devs are either laid off or protesting.

I'm at a loss as to how they overspent on oblivion? It's bloody awful and yeah I know people are loving it but for me it was a right kick in the plums because I had such high expectations for it and they delivered a world class turd. One of my favorite games ruined...please note this is a personal opinion 👍

@Northern_munkey Just remember if you see BGS anywhere on the game then EXPECT bugs and performance issues

@Oram77 it's just amazing that my laptop plays oblivion with mods better than the ps5. And my laptop isn't a gaming lappy at all.

"as a showpiece for what it could do"

Yep, they showed what they could do with Oblivion Rm - a complete Technical mess!

@Northern_munkey
The curse of UE5...
Although IIRC listening to DF, this had additional issues going on too.

@Rich33 hot take: but UE5 has been a cancer for this generation.

@Northern_munkey Just looked at the Steam reviews and the most recent 2k reviews have been mixed for.... you guess it performance. But hey if you ain't running into problems then you are winning 👍

@Oram77
No, I 100% agree with you. I cringe every time I hear its being used for a game. UE4 would be much more preferable if they cant use a bespoke engine. UE5 is just too resource intensive for this generation of hardware.

@Rich33 Yup, just look at Stellar Blade that was on UE4 and look what Shift up were able to do with it.

@Oram77
Stellar blade, Lies of P, and Hogwarts Legacy I believe - all of which are really stable technically.

@Rich33 Also can't believe CDPR would drop their own Red engine for UE5...

@Oram77
I had forgotten about that - though hopefully we will be on PS6 before we see a new game from them (NB just guessing - I dont have the foggiest when they are planned). Hopefully PS6 will handle UE5 better, but I suspect the output would have been better under theirs still.

I used to be a programmer and then web developer, but not a game developer.

Given the cyclical nature of software projects (be they games, accounting packages, or whatever), plus the uncertainty of predicting sales, I imagine that cycles of hiring, release, and layoffs will just be a standard part of the industry moving forward.

Many developers in this cycle are probably already taking this into consideration when financial planning.

@Jammer Their jobs could have varied greatly from game production to social media marketing and everything in between.

Sandfall did and incredible job making Clair Obscur, but whilst the core in-house team had around 30 members, they used a lot of external partners for art, animation, QA, voice production, etc. The true count of people who worked on it likely reaches into triple digits, and it sets a bad precedent for the industry to expect that a game of that quality can be made by 30 people, when it's simply not true, granted it definitely didn't need 4000!

It's crazy that a remastered studio has half the staff of nintendo, oblivion remastered is good, but not 4.000 people good 😅

So they work on a massively successful game and still get sacked. Late stage capitalism needs to die an agonising death.

Dont you people worry the CEO's and top brass will get extra.