Another acclaimed studio is cutting jobs. Sucker Punch Productions, the Sony-owned developer behind Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei, has reportedly laid off staff, even as its latest samurai epic continues to be one of the biggest PlayStation hits in recent memory.
The news was first reported by Aftermath, which spoke with a former Sucker Punch employee and viewed an internal email sent to the team. Aftermath initially reported that 26 people had lost their jobs, but later corrected the figure to 24.
What Sucker Punch Told Its Staff
According to Aftermath, studio leadership framed the cuts around the wider industry and the needs of whatever the team is building next. The email read:
"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."
Leadership went on to acknowledge how difficult the day was for the team and promised more information soon.
"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 worked 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 will go into more details about the future."
That last line is worth watching. Sucker Punch has not publicly announced its next game, and the promise of more details about the future suggests staff will learn more about the studio's direction in the coming days. Whether any of that becomes public is another question.
Aftermath said it reached out to Sony for comment but had not received a response at the time of publishing.
A Big Hit for a Smaller Studio
By triple-A standards, Sucker Punch is not a huge team. Aftermath reports that the studio has a total headcount of fewer than 200 people, which means losing 24 developers is a significant share of the staff.
The timing is what has a lot of players frustrated. Ghost of Yotei launched on PS5 in 2025 to strong reviews, following Atsu on a revenge story across Ezo, the land now known as Hokkaido. Aftermath noted that, as of this summer, the game was reportedly Sony's best-selling PS5 title of the year, trailing Ghost of Tsushima in units sold but beating it in revenue. The studio also released the Echoes of Sekigahara expansion, which picked up its own share of praise.
Sucker Punch has been a PlayStation first-party studio since Sony acquired it in 2011. Before the Ghost games, the Bellevue, Washington team was best known for the Sly Cooper and inFamous series, making it one of the longest-running partners in PlayStation's history.
Success Is No Guarantee of Safety
Sucker Punch joins a long list of teams that have faced cuts despite releasing well-received games. Across the industry, publishers have been trimming headcount and reorganizing studios as development costs climb, and even studios with clear hits have not been spared. Over on the Xbox side, Dishonored studio Arkane Lyon has been given one more month to save itself as Microsoft looks for a partner for Blade.
The ongoing wave of cuts has also fed into a bigger conversation about how the industry keeps experienced developers around, something we looked at in our piece on the talent shortage in the face of skyrocketing game industry layoffs.
For fans of the Ghost series, the hope is that the core team behind the games remains intact for whatever comes next. The Ghost of Tsushima anime adaptation from Crunchyroll and Aniplex is still on the way, so the franchise itself is not going anywhere. Our thoughts are with everyone affected at Sucker Punch, and we hope they land on their feet quickly.
What do you think of Sony cutting jobs at the studio behind one of its biggest recent hits?
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