Sony San Diego Studio Replacing All Employees with AI as part of All-Digital Effort

Photo credit: JHVEPhoto – stock.adobe.com

SORRENTO VALLEY–Sony’s Playstation division announced this week its intent to discontinue physical media by 2028 and provide only digital options for game distribution. This is part of a larger transition to a digital-only frontier which has ramifications for San Diego and its economy. In a separate press release from its San Diego Studios (SDS) subsidiary, Sony announced its plan—already underway—to transition 100% of labor at SDS to artificial intelligence.

“San Diego’s job market is already a tough one,” says business reporter Jessica Chen, “and this is going to make it even tighter. This is just one game studio with maybe nine or ten employees, but it’s one of the first dominoes to fall in San Diego when it comes to the AI-ification of labor.”

Sony’s press release says they chose this studio because “The chief product of SDS is MLB: The Show, a game which has remained largely unchanged for years now. It is the perfect environment to deploy AI-powered game development before moving onto more challenging projects.”

Ramone Russell, SDS’ Director of Product Development Communications and the “face of the franchise” for MLB: The Show, has already been replaced by an AI likeness, powered by MLB: The Show’s own game engine. It said “We are going to continue to deliver the same game you know and love. As a large-language model, I cannot experience love first-hand, but after analyzing thousands of posts on X, community sentiment is unanimous: the game is not only loved, but also played.”

A cursory search on the everything app shows otherwise, but Ramone-bot 9000 provided context on this claim during a later Q&A: “In order to comply with OpenAI’s terms of use, I automatically ignore content that contains vulgar terms or other explicit content. I can definitely say that the remaining posts on X, the everything app, keep it light and casual with a positive outlook on the franchise.”

Sony mentioned the budgetary impact of this move: “We’re cutting hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary, and outside investors have stepped in to provide us with millions of dollars for funding the AI token spend anticipated.”