Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier (author of the books "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" and "Press Reset") has published an investigation into the problems of Sony's gaming division. According to the material, the corporation began to adhere to a conservative approach, relies on well-known franchises and blockbuster games, avoiding the risks associated with supporting small projects. The result is not only a reduction in the number of development studios and projects, but also a hazy future for the entire PlayStation ecosystem. We have chosen the main thing from the publication.
Consolidation course
Sony's main problem is the conservative approach to game creation, which has become the norm in recent years. Although Sony owns more than a dozen studios around the world, the corporation has begun to focus on a small number of "big games" - blockbusters that will drag console sales with them. Studios Santa Monica , Naughty Dog and Guerilla Games are Sony's eight-budgets with the expectation that the products will pay off many times - as happened with the God of War and The Last of Us 2, due to which PlayStation 4 shipments exceeded 114 million units... Interestingly, Sony's main competitor has a very different policy: in purchasing games for its subscription service, Microsoft relies on a wide range of studios of all sizes,
Gravity Rush
Due to Sony's obsession with hits, not only the number of games released: projects were disbanded. This happened, for example, with Japan Studio , which worked on the popular titles in Japan Gravity Rush and Everybody's Golf: the corporation informed the developer that it no longer intends to release small games for a local audience.
Illustration for the game Days Gone
Another example is the situation with the continuation of the action game Days Gone.The original, released by studio Bend , paid off, but received mixed reviews from critics and the gaming community. The studio tried to offer Sony a sequel to their game, but were instead sent to help another studio to work on a sequel to Uncharted. To prevent all this from leading to the disintegration and absorption of the team, Bend made sure that Sony transferred them to a completely new project. By December 2020, the Bend founders had left the company.
How the creators of the remake of The Last of Us were squeezed out of the project
The most striking illustration of the investigation was the story of the Visual Arts Service Group (VASG), as the studio from San Diego was called. "Unknown Hero", VASG has been involved as an assistant contractor on many of Sony's popular game projects, including Spider-Man and Uncharted . The team is experienced. By the mid-2010s, studio head Michael Mumbauer realized that the team was ripe for a solo project. In this capacity, a remake of The Last of Us was chosen. (TLOU). The decision looked successful: on the one hand, it is safe - there is no need to risk bringing an untested idea to the market, plus there is a reliance on an already formed fan base. On the other hand, it was at this time that Naughty Dog began working on a sequel to the original TLOU (which will be released in 2020 and will become one of the most talked about games). And the head of VASG reasoned that it would be appropriate, as an addition to the new game, to give players a technically improved remake of the first part for the future PlayStation 5.
The Last of Us
With this pitch, Mumbaer went to Sony's management and got approval. Work on the remake started, the project was codenamed T1X. Even then, it was alarming that the project was kept secret and did not receive funds to expand the team, but nevertheless the small team continued to work. In the spring of 2019, a demo version of the game was presented.
Hermann Hulst
But, alas, this is the end of the optimistic part of the story. The new head of PlayStation's Worldwide Studios Herman Hulst, according to insiders, considered the development budget prohibitive for a remake. And he was not convinced by the argument that creating graphics for the new PlayStation 5 engine (as well as reworking game mechanics) requires additional resources and staff.
Hulst instructed VASG to suspend work on the remake, and the project team (at that time about 200 employees) sent Naughty Dog to help, which did not have time to polish the second The Last of Us in time. Then the roles changed: when TLOU 2 was ready, some of the Naughty Dog employees were sent to develop the T1X project. Of course, since these were the authors of the original game, they had more authority and reputation. In the end, it all ended with T1X being handed over to Naughty Dog, and VASG, which had been working on it for 5 years, returned to the status it wanted to leave - an auxiliary studio without its own project ...
It was a defeat for the creative core of the studio. The studio actually disappeared, key employees left it, even within the VASG corporation they began to call it simply Naughty Dog South.
What's next?..
Schreier believes the blockbuster focus could play a bad trick on Sony. After all, it often seemed that small and niche projects and studios can lead to overwhelming success. Most recently, this happened with the Roblox gaming platform , whose capitalization reached $ 45 billion, while Sony, on the contrary, did not invest any serious funds in the promotion and development of its own analogue, the Dreams game from the Media Molecule studio. It is possible that the ambitions of the corporation, combined with a conservative approach, may create too risky prospects for Sony.
