Better Get Comfortable at Home
The COVID-19 outbreak has proved a challenge for all companies and employees over the past month. Most have been forced to work from home in order to stop the spread of the deadly disease. Sony and PlayStation have been no exception. As it stands all of their workers, including contractors have been instructed to work from home. However, a recent memo has surfaced showing that Sony will not be taking any chances for the foreseeable future. All PlayStation employees will be working from home until at least May.
Keep in mind that this deadline is only a bare minimum. PlayStation workers could be stuck at home for much longer than planned. Pandemics are obviously a tough thing to predict. But at the rate that things are going now, there is no clear timetable for when working in-person will be deemed safe enough to return back to normal. The current April 30th deadline could easily be moved to a later date if the situation does not improve. As it stands, all PlayStation workers in Japan, the US, and Europe are affected by these restrictions.
It is hard to tell at the moment how this will affect productivity, but judging from other companies, chances are this will slow things down. Certain developers like CD Projekt Red have promised that the COVID-19 pandemic will not delay games like Cyberpunk 2077, but others like Ubisoft have stated that their plans for some of their games have been halted due to a shortage in manpower.
While it may be disappointing that we might not be getting things on time, worker safety is paramount. While other industries have failed spectacularly to put their employee’s safety first, thankfully the video game industry has done the right thing.