Today, we are doing a round up of some the recent news regarding various developer studios.

First, last week’s cuts at Sony Europe. After Sony’s official announcement of their intention to “streamline” their operations, various employees were given their redundancy letters on Wednesday. We have somewhat of a breakdown of the different Sony studios affected by the cuts. Rather than axing entire projects, Sony has made general cuts across all (or most) projects. Most of the affected staff were given basic redundancy packages as dictated by local country laws.

Aside from Guerilla Studios in Amsterdam, almost all Sony staff in Europe is based in the UK, so most of the lay-offs affected their workforce in the UK industry, where labor laws are the most permissive, compared to the rest of Europe. In comparison, Dutch laws have largely prevented the downsizing of Guerilla Studios because of potential associated costs to Sony. Since this was a cost-cutting exercise, UK studios suffered the most:

• Sony Liverpool – where WipeOut and F1 are produced – lost over 50 employees. Sony QA for European titles is also largely based at Sony Liverpool.
• Sony Cambridge lost about 20 people, almost a full quarter of their staff.
• The Sony London studios also let go of over 50 employees. It handles various projects such as HOME, The Getaway, EyeToy, SingStar as well as various R&D and support departments.
• 30 staff across Sony Territories, mostly in sales, marketing and PR in various countries were dismissed as well. Please see this very useful Sony Europe organizational chart for details.

In other news, the building housing developers Human Head Studios burnt down in massive fire early Friday Morning. Officials have reported no injuries. Human Head is best known for the titles Rune, and more recently Prey.

Finally, we want to report on the rumor that the FASA Studios, makers of Shadowrun will be imminently shut down. Apparently, as Shadowrun entered the final certification process, most of the staff were informed that they would need to find new jobs. As FASA is wholly owned by Microsoft, affected employees should largely (and hopefully) be able to find new jobs within Microsoft. This is not the first report on the trouble affecting FASA Studios: rumors of the strife affecting the studio, and its impending demise have been plentiful.

We want to wish all employees affected by these recent events (and rumored events) the best of luck. We hope they land back on their feet as quickly as possible.

Posted by Raoul on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 11:25 am.