Sony Officially Cutting 160 Jobs

Cue the dozens of Donald Trump jokes, as Sony Computer Entertainment Europe will be making a moderately sized layoff of 160 employees. The news comes despite the brisk launch and sales of the PlayStation 3 in Europe. The 160 employees are believed to be close to 10% of SCEE's workforce. The layoffs include people from both SCEE and Sony World Wide Studios. Sony claims that "in order to achieve necessary cost reductions, it is possible that there will be up to 160 redundancies in total across SCEE in the UK, WWS in Europe and in the [surrounding] Territories."

Speaking to GameDaily Biz, Nick Sharples, SCEE's Director of Corporate Communications, offered some additional clarity on the issue. "We have informed our staff that we are considering proposals that may result in a number of redundancies across the SCEE Group in Europe. Until those consultations are complete we will not know how many redundancies may be needed. We will not be providing any additional information on this process or making further announcements at the conclusion of the process."

"The reason for the proposals is that, although SCEE has successfully faced a number of challenges throughout its history to become a leader of the videogame industry, our industry is in the middle of a period of transition where some of the fundamentals of our business are changing," he explained. "Chief amongst these is that we are entering a future of increasingly networked and converged entertainment. In order to maintain our leading position in the market we sometimes have to make difficult business decisions. The management of the company has concluded that we need to change our structure, streamline and strengthen our business operations – and that our cost base needs to be significantly reduced."

Those who are set to be laid off will know their fate by the end of Wednesday (today). The jobs will largely be redundancies, as mentioned before; meaning two or more of the same positions, unnecessary roles that can be consolidated into another position, and etc.