Zipper Interactive Shuttered by Sony

After a week that saw multiple studios and publishers laying off employees amid canceled projects and less-than-stellar financial reports, pretty much the last thing anyone needed was another layoff story. So, consider this my apology for being the bearer of bad news yet again.

Sony has confirmed today that Zipper Interactive, the studio in charge of the console maker's long-standing SOCOM series of online shooters, has been closed. According to a prepared statement by Sony, the closure comes as a result of a "resource re-alignment."

Sony could well fold a number of the Redmond, Washington based developer's employees into other divisions of the company, but as of right now the company hasn't specified how many of the employees will be moved elsewhere, versus outright laid off. Zipper employed roughly 80 staff members.

What is Alex's news nickname?

I blame Bioware.

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA????

i blame joe biden

Well that's a shame but this seems to be what happens if you try and make something different and it doesn't catch on.

Can't blame 'em for giving it the college try but Sony backed them up time and time again and they failed to get a hit. I wonder how much of that was on the dev side and how much on Sony's. Either way I can't say I've ever been excited about a Zipper game besides MAG and the world has Battlefield in full effect making that kind of unnecessary.

Still though, hope it works out for them.

Wow, bummer. I really loved MAG. It's a shame SOCOM 4 was not the best.

Well THANKS Obama.

Crappy. Crimson Skies will always be one of my favorites. Good luck to those let go.

Fuck everything about this.

Thanks Sony. I'm sure you had nothing to do with them making yet another game in a franchise that no longer sells.

Moment of silence

Noooooo, not the Recoil guys! Their work was awesome!

Sucks that people are out of jobs but I'm not suprised. They never could recapture what they had in the PS2 days and Socom 4 was garbage.

It's a damn shame, they have made some great multiplayer games. MAG was a fantastic concept and was actually a good deal of fun. I just think it was a little ahead of its time. The game had really average graphics and effects, and that helps push a game like that. Besides that the gameplay was very solid. I just hope the people who lost their jobs land on their feet.

Pretty crappy news. Good luck to those who lost their jobs. Game development is a damn cutthroat and unstable business to be in anymore.

That sucks, for such a rapidly expanding industry it seems like we're hearing this kind of news far too often.

Wow, what a week.

GAME shut downs. Robert Bowling leaves Activision. Yoshinori Ono leaves Street Fighter (for now). Kelle Santiago leaves thatgamecompany. Relic and Vigil get hit with lay offs. Now this. Crazy times.

Damn It I demand you change the shitty ending Alex!!

@rebgav said:

@Tuffgong said:

Can't blame 'em for giving it the college try but Sony backed them up time and time again and they failed to get a hit. I wonder how much of that was on the dev side and how much on Sony's.

Well, they released a multiplayer shooter on the day that Sony's network went to shit, then released another multiplayer shooter as a launch title for a handheld. They (may or) may not be great games but it's not really puzzling that they didn't get much attention.

In all fairness Zipper has been going downhill since Combined Assault

the costs make companies with bad tack records dissapear too much spending too little revenues not suprised this guys died never made anything worth playing after the ps2

@bigsmoke77 said:

What is Alex's news nickname?

Lex Newsthor

I just want to add that Unit 13 is one hell of a good game.

R.I.P. Socom 1 and 2 still one of my most fondest times in gaming.

Such a shame to see these guys go. I really enjoyed MAG for what it was but I never played the SOCOM series as I didn't own a PS2 but even before that they were making great games like MechWarrior 3 and Crimson Skies. They've only been with Sony since 2006 and I guess the titles they did produce didn't sell too great with SOCOM 4 being their worst received title having a 67 on metacritic.

Major bummer. Best of luck to those affected by this.

Is this the beginning of the end for the modern military shooter? I hope so, although they'll just replace it with something just as annoying.

Christ man, the industry is collapsing. It's not even about making good games anymore, if your game isn't a blockbuster, you're done in a matter of months.

Obviously not every game can set the world on fire, so I wonder what this will mean for the future of creativity in these games. Can you even try anything interesting, if a flop almost guarantees you'll lose your job?

I loved the Socom PS2 games but in the age of Call of Duty it didn't help to come out with Socom: Confrontation, so maybe you could say Slant 6 sunk Zipper's boat. MAG seemed kind of cool but I wasn't really interested, Socom 4 didn't seem quite there. The Unit 13 demo was cool, I'll probably grab the full game before I go on vacation in a month. It has been a while since they've had a success though and in this age of sky-high budgets I can see why Sony made this decision, very unfortunate.

i really cant say im too shocked over this.  
 
but, best of luck to everyone. 

It's always shitty to hear about a studio closing down and jobs being lost. Pour one out for 'em.

SOCOM II is easily one of my favorite games on the PS2. I spent more hours than I'd like to admit playing that game.

Never played any of their games but this is what happens when you have several retail disappointments in a row. It's just business.

Hope all involved find more work soon.

This is sad; MAG was actually pretty fun, never got to play the new SOCOM though. Wish the best to everyone at Zipper.

I feel that if they had made an HD Socom 2 instead of 4 then this may not have happened.

Socom was the first online game I got into. I was 10 and playing until 3am every friday and saturday night. I loved that game so much.

R.I.P. Zipper

I guess there won't be another Unit 13 for Vita. Dangit.

Still think that lots of the problems that Zipper had recently was the launch right near the downtime with PSN, shame to hear this news & best of luck to those people let go.

Wow it's like no one is safe nowadays.

It's really a dark hour for game development.

so no MAG 2? :[

wow, that sucks, I had fun with MAG, even though it had a stupid name, it was a good game

awh man :(

MAG will always be one of my favorite shooters simply because of the scale that it attempted to give its matches. Plus, if you had a good squad, you were guaranteed to have fun!

Thanks for the memories, Zipper! :(

MechWarrior 3 was a lot of fun back in the day.

Tis a shame, but I kinda saw this coming. Their best was SOCOM 2. Their past releases haven't been great. Although, I haven't tried Unit 13 yet. MAG was fun, but didn't have much staying power for me. I blame SVER.

SOCOM II TNT next week! How 'bout it?!

Should have made the Socom that the fans wanted.

I feel no remorse in this.

@fox01313 said:

Still think that lots of the problems that Zipper had recently was the launch right near the downtime with PSN, shame to hear this news & best of luck to those people let go.

Yeah, while it might not have been the sole reason, releasing a high budget multiplayer focused game a couple of days before a month long downtime can't have helped the sales. Sad, Zipper did a lot of stuff that interested me, MechWarrior 3 might have been their high point (haven't played the SOCOM games though), but MAG, DeathDrome and Crimson Skies were all interesting games, conceptually if nothing else, but even Zipper's low water marks seem to have been fairly good. MAG was certainly one of the console modern military shooters that appealed the most to me, feeling a lot more like the spiritual successor to Battlefield 2 than BF3 did.

@ApeGantz said:

Should have made the Socom that the fans wanted.

I feel no remorse in this.

^ This. They blatantly ignored the majority of their fan base through multiple iterations. This was bound to happen.