Ex-Sony exec Chris Deering tells laid off workers: ‘Go to the beach for a year or drive an Uber’

Deering, who led Sony’s European PlayStation business from 1995 to 2005, compared sweeping cuts in the gaming industry to being “like the pandemic”, while downplaying the role of corporate greed and dishing out controversial advice to impacted workers.

“You’re going to have to take a few, figure out how to get through it, drive an Uber or whatever,” he said on My Perfect Console podcast. “Find a cheap place to live and go to the beach for a year.”

Over 20,000 workers in the gaming industry have been laid off since 2023

Since 2023, around 645,000 tech workers have been laid off—over 20,000 of them are in the video gaming industry which has recently been hit hard.

This year through May alone, more than 10,000 gaming workers lost their jobs, surpassing the total number of layoffs in the industry for the entire year of 2023.

Sony laid off 900 PlayStation employees (around 8% of its workforce) in February and shut its London Studio.

Other game developers, including Microsoft and Unity, have similarly downsized their studios this year, cutting nearly 4,000 jobs at the start of the year.

At the time, Sony’s then-CEO Jim Ryan said the cost-cutting measure was to “streamline our resources”. 

Meanwhile, Unity’s interim chief Jim Whitehurst, explained that the company is “reducing the number of things we are doing in order to focus on our core business and drive our long-term success and profitability,” in an internal memo. 

Despite this, Deering said: “I don’t think it’s fair to say that the resulting layoffs have been greed.”

“I always tried to minimize the speed in which we added staff because I always knew there would be a cycle,” he added, before noting that, “if the money isn’t coming in from the consumers on the last game, it’s going to be hard to justify spending the money for the next game”.

But don’t spend too long at a beach house

Deering is an industry veteran who worked at Atari before joining Sony and was a major player in the launch of the company’s first console, the PlayStation, and the PlayStation 2. 

He went on to become chairman at Codemasters, a racing video games company, until 2010 and is currently an advisor for Cudo Ventures, a Cryptocurrency Mining Software company.

Despite the current state of the gaming industry, Deering assured that he’s “optimistic about the future… even people who have just recently been laid off.” 

“I think it’s probably very painful for the managers, but I don’t think that having skill in this area is going to be a lifetime of poverty or limitation,” he added. “It’s still where the action is.”

“These things do recover sometimes a lot faster than you might think when all is very precarious.”

It’s why, after advising laid-off workers to wait out the current downturn on the beach or as an Uber driver, Deering cautioned them not to disconnect from it all for too long. 

“Keep up with your news,” he concluded. “Keep up with it, because once you get off the train, it’s much harder.”

Not everyone in the game industry was on board with Deering’s comments. The games division of the IWGB union tweeted that they showed the need to unionize: “Without it, we’re left with ‘let them eat cake,’” the union wrote.

22000 game devs have been laid off. Chris Deering’s response: “Go to the beach, drive an Uber.”

With a strong union, we can get what we deserve – work-life balance and job security.

Without it, we’re left with “let them eat cake”

Join our union today: https://t.co/Xm08SjCMBI https://t.co/bg43JbySrs

— IWGB Game Workers (@IWGB_GW) September 10, 2024

Fortune reached out to Sony, Deering, and Cudo Ventures for comment.