This reports looks very detailed, full of facts and sources to support his opinion, so so let's say that what he said is true.
The situation seems complex in Sony. The internal restructuring does not seem to proceed in the right direction, the balance whithin Sony in terms to the weight that internal studies have within the corporate strategies looks not stable.
Well, it's reasonable after all, Sony's big hits come from America, but it almost seems that Naughty Dog and Santa Monica are ironically freezing the creativity of the entire company.
ND is a huge monster who, thanks to the success of their games, swallows up the other teams who are forced to come to the rescue in the development since, today, to make a game as big as TLOU2 needs not only huge funds, but a lot of developers and years of work.
Let's remember that when we talk about "Naughty Dog created TLOU2" we say half of the truth, to help the development there are at least a dozen other development studios (from America to India).
If you ask at Bend Studio to drop everything, or to slow down the projects in progress, certainly the people who created the studio in the 90s are not happy.
It looks like a bubble ready to explode.
You cannot allow to lose important devs from your studios, you must also understand that video games are a creative product, where the convergence of the arts of different figures must be accompanied by the right authorial compensation even only in terms of creative freedom.
If you take a 3d artist, who is called ARTIST not randomly, and you always put him to do things where he never has a word because the directives come from the creative director of another studio in another city, without ever having a response, a feedback, a creative and human contact every day for years, him will never be happy.
Now, I've been in the field of 3d graphics as an indie dev and today I'm specializing at university, and believe me that sharing opinions, feedbacks, but also techniques to use is very important for the creative process. If you become a simple mechanism of a gear that you don't even see how big it is, it can fit you well for a project, maybe two, but then you want to have your personal gratification, you want to develop your projects and to have your creativity free to run because let's remember always that videogames are not cars, where there is the pre-established production process and from the worker to the manager you are only a part of the gear, videogames are a CREATIVE process, where the concept artist talks to the lead, and then speaks with the creative director to understand the general vision and the direction to take, then all together go to see how the 3d artist execute their ideas and then they talk about them, evaluate them, change them and at the end improve the design, and so it happens with everything from the writing to music.
In short, having a couple, or three big teams, that lead hundreds and hundreds of people, employed for years of their lives for projects where they have almost no voice is not a positive thing. Not at all.
Sony needs to be carefull regarding this, otherwise they will find themselves having jsut a couple of IPs that become too colossal and not handable for normal-sized teams, forcing them to put all their resources into these projects, with the result of having only a couple of huge games in one gen that maybe they repay the whole shelter, who's know, but on a creative level it's a failure.
TL;DR
it's a mess
blog.playstation.com
