SIEE had no prior knowledge of PS5 reveal.

A new report from VGC says that Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe (SIEE) is undergoing a "restructuring" of several areas at the company, including marketing and PR. VGC says that they were informed of this unfortunate news from "people with knowledge of the situation."

As if that wasn't bad enough, VGC's report says that SIEE employees were informed about when American PlayStation directors visited SIEE in their London location. Those employees who were impacted by these layoffs were given notice shortly thereafter. Some employees that were not immediately laid off had to set up meetings in order to re-interview for their jobs. There were also an undisclosed number of layoffs that hit the US-based creative services team.

Some of these employees impacted by this move voiced this anger online. One former employee, in a now deleted Tweet, said that they "hate that this is going to be drowned by the PS5 announcement."

According to a number of reports, Sony Interactive Entertainment America (SIEA) has had its influence grow in the past year. This actually isn't too surprising. A number of reports have come out recently about internal power struggles within Sony's various PlayStation divisions. While Sony has obviously not confirmed any of those rumors, the reports reached a fevered pitch with the very abrupt news that Shawn Layden was parting ways from the company after more than 30 years of employment.

The PlayStation arm of Sony has reportedly been moving towards a more "centralised global structure" over the past year. In the past, all main regions of PlayStation were allowed to act on their own. These branches could sign their own games and set their own marketing budgets.

As VGC notes, this allowed the European branch to more heavily market the PlayStation Move while North America had a bigger push for Driveclub. This almost "disjointed group operation" was said to cause issue with some third-party publishers.

This latest restructuring not only means that a lot of people are now out of a job, but that SIEA is taking over as the global lead. SIEE will now have to more frequently take orders from the American branch.

To exacerbate the issue, a number of European employees say that they were not even aware of SIEA's decision to announce new PlayStation 5 details on Wired. Employees had only found out about the reveal when the rest of the world did: When they were published to the general public. Those who were under the employ of SIEE say that they are more than disappointed in the decision to announce these layoffs at the same time as new PS5 details emerged. Though it was perhaps coincidental, this timing ensured that this news would be largely drowned out by the PlayStation 5 reveals.

Hopefully those employees that have been impacted by these layoffs are able to land on their feet sooner rather than later.