Sony Acquires Dutch Developer Nixxes to Beef Up First-Party Tech Support

Aside From PC Stuff Sony Should Use Them to Help Their Studio's Put Out PS5 Upgrade Patches?

They're a PC port specialist so fuels more fire to the theory that Sony's ultimate goal with PC is exactly the same as Microsoft (day 1 PC release for 1st party releases).

This screams to me as acquisition in order to ensure PC ports of PS4/5 games with relative ease, taking the pressure of the actual game dev team that won't be overly familiar with PC ports and freeing them up to continue on other projects.
Nice business sense to expand to PC.

@Areus I don’t think so.

Interesting....

[Envisions a future of PlayStation that might make a lot of die-hards very, very mad]

Great news. Not an acquisition that sets the gaming world on fire, but one that will improve the workflow overall.

@Grumblevolcano While I wouldn't be surprised if this was connected to more PC ports, I still don't believe day 1 PC ports will be happening for Sony games anytime soon.

It'd be so much cooler to find out about all these acquisitions within a proper PlayStation presentation rather than this social media drip feed.

That's great too, excellent addition.

If only Hulst would just come clean and say that Nixxes will be their PC porting studio it would put a lot of people at ease, especially those on the fence of buying a PS5 and any future Sony hardware because that's certainly what many will interpret this purchase as.

@Grumblevolcano Not really, day 1 release would be developed concurrently by main developer, it wouldn’t need to be ported.

They will port years old games

Smart acquisition. They should make those PC ports much better.

Definitely going to be a support studio as you mention they were for Square.

Makes sense, as the bigger the games Sony make, the more support they need.

Weren't Nixes the company responsible for Lara Croft's hair tech that Crystal dynamics made a huge deal about for the Tomb Raider reboot...remaster on PS4?

Sounds like a sensible aquisition for Sony's development. Also Utrecht is beautiful! Im sure they already enjoyed an excellent relationship with Guerilla Games in Amsterdam.

If Sony are spending i hope the following come in-house:

• Bluepoint (effectively confirmed)
• Level 5
• Nihon Falcom
• Sumo Digital

I wonder if there is some kind of gradual drip-feed of acquisition news that Sony is doing, like building up to a climax of some sort. We still expect Bluepoint news to drop. Then maybe …Remedy? Square-Enix? Capcom? I’m kidding of course, but the way these announcements are spaced out makes me wonder.

Good get for Sony. I expect the quality of Crystal Dynamics output to suffer though, Nixxes were the guys that fixed their Tomb Raider games.

@Rob_230
Well, it was AMD's tech called TressFX, but the Tomb Raider 2013 PC game was the first to use it. And they created a modified version called PureHair for Rise of the Tomb Raider.
So it's all open source tech they've used, but obviously still takes talent to implement.

Considering Nixxes specializes specifically in PC porting Sony is probably about to commit a lot more to that platform than we were initially led on to believe

@blinx01 That's the one, thanks! In honesty, i may have been confusing TressFX with Nixxes 🙂

Still exciting times for Playstation gamers

So I wonder if the bluepoint tweet really was a mistake or we're being drip fed acquisition news. It's surprising nonetheless that they seem to be on a shopping spree.

@Th3solution
I'd love the bombshell to go something like this BOOM Atlus acquired, Persona 6 exclusive. Persona 4 Golden port coming soon.

Of course that would only happen in my wildest dreams.

@Areus Yes! I think as Xbox have their own dedicated team that Playstation should have theirs, helping devs release the PS5 upgrade quicker.

That's pretty cool of Playstation to shine some light on a studio like this. They don't get much credit for their work since they aren't the creative energy behind games but they do play a major role in getting some of these big AAA games working at all so kudos to Sony and congrats to the team!

So far, Sony acquired one developer studio (Housemarquee) and one support studio (Nixxes), maybe we'll get another support studio, but this one will focus on mobile.

Specialists in PC ports…………gReAt.

Keep pushing me to PC ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Sony.

Edit: Added a comma for the grammar nazi, that is down below.

@GADG3Tx87 Atlus would be a dream acquisition. Persona 3 shadow drop. Available on PS4/5 NOW

Bluepoint definitely isnt a mistake. If the demons souls pic wasnt in the image i'd say maybe? But i think they want to announce the purchase with a game or something. To coincide with a game event rumoured for next week maybe 🤔

Am I right in thinking that Nixxes did the Xbox 360 port of Rise of the Tomb Raider?
That was solid down port!

If the case that they did, my thought process is because a bunch of PS5 "exclusives" are now also coming to PS4 (God of War 2, Gran Turismo 7 etc) due to lack of PS5 consoles, Nixxes is going to help port these PS5 games to PS4 so they run just as good.

Could be entirely wrong though and the whole PC thing be the correct reasoning.

@OmegaStriver Better a dedicated PC porting studio, than using precious resources in the 'traditional studios', who could be developing new titles for PS5.

Guerilla and Bend both had to divert resource to work on Horizon and Days Gone. Much better if another company can deliver that on their behalf.

It's a shame Sony don't do a port of PlayStation OS to the PC, that way you could have the flexibility of the PC ecosystem with an OS designed specifically for gaming, ease of use and integration with PSN etc. I'm sure there's lots of hurdles to overcome like driver support and keeping it updated etc but that would be an interesting proposition.

@Rob_230 Level-5...maybe. Nintendo would be the other obvious guess but they dont like bailing out sinking ships otherwise they would have nabbed AlphaDream.

NihonFalcom....nope. Those guys are spending a lot of time pulling themselves away from being dependant on PlayStation along with a lot of other Japanese developers of their scale.

@Grumblevolcano nothing about this suggests that Sony will ever release its first party games day 1 on PC.

@OmegaStriver
"Keep pushing me to PC Sony"

And here we see why commas are important.

@render what would be the point? If people aren't going to buy a console for its exclusives why would they go and dual boot another operating system for it? Also I'm pretty sure Playstation uses a modified freebsd/openbsd OS so it's not like it isn't already available.

What I'd like is the ability to install ps4/5 games from disk. Now that would be amazing

@Haruki_NLI luckily falcom is as independent as it gets now. We're even getting simultaneous console and pc releases with the new games

Nixxes were hiring last year for a game director as well apparently. Could be working on an original project of their own.

Long time Crystal Dynamics collaborator? There's a rumour of Bluepoint working on a Legacy Of Kain project..........I know it's nothing please just let me enjoy the fantasy 😭😭😭😭

I think the good part is the other teams can focus on the console instead of porting games.
🤷‍♂️

@Rob_230 I honestly don't want Sony to acquire Atlus if only because that'll probably mean they'll almost exclusively focus on Persona stuff until the end of time, and as someone who vastly prefers SMT I don't want that lol

@Keyblade-Dan
I thought they were doing MGS remake?

@JJ2 MGS is completely a rumor right now. I'd love for it to happen but it's nowhere near confirmed

PlayStation Studios games on PC future seems to be moving full steam ahead!

@Areus doubt it, they are more likely to port games like Demon Souls to PS4, IMO.

let me fix that title for you:
Sony Acquires Dutch Developer Nixxes that specializes in porting games to PC so they can port more games to PC.

@JJ2 what you have missed and don't know is that this studio does not port games single handedly. they just help making the ports high quality lol the rest of the studios are obligated to make their own PC ports.

They BETTER not be working on porting PlayStation exclusives to PC.

@Rob_230 @GADG3Tx87 Atlus was for sale at some point, Sega bought them. I honestly doubt anyone can get ownership of Atlus without acquiring all of Sega (and that is why so many Xbox fans want Microsoft to acquire Sega.)

I rather bluepoint instead.word up son

@Tharsman And THAT's something I'd don't want happening either lol

@Grumblevolcano That is the obvious endpoint of where they're heading, yes. And they're barreling towards it so fast that they might get there sooner than we think. Look at how far they've come in barely a year and a half. From Herman Hulst saying:

"We think Horizon Zero Dawn is a good fit for PC to show people what they may be missing out on."

To him saying:

"Our PC players are important to us (the PC players that they, of course, did not even have prior to 2020, not counting people who may have been using PSNow on PC. Yeah, they're "important" to Sony now, apparently.) and PlayStation owners will receive the best versions of our games at launch" (Fully cognizant of the fact that PlayStation owners ultimately will not have the best versions of their games.)

Sony purchasing a studio specifically to port games to PC? Yep, that's just part of the insane escalation. But of course it has to be dressed up in a way so it won't seem like Sony did something that actively offers no benefit to the PlayStation community. Besides, they still want to mislead us into buying their systems, anyway.

@ArcticSin For me personally I got fed up with PC gaming because I seemed to spend more time fixing issues with Windows and drivers than I did actually playing games. I'm sure there are lots of people out there who like that tinkering you have to do to just play games but that's not me. Now if there was an OS that did away with all that BS then I'd be up for that as it means you can actually spend quality time just playing games.
You are right in that freebsd is available already but it won't have access to the Playstation GUI plus all of the integration with the PS services and the SDK etc. They would all need to be added on top to get to what PS OS offers.

I'm happy with the Acquisitions. I'm hoping obviously the next one is Bluepoint which we already know is probably happening.

Koei Tecmo would be nice.

Sumo Digital would be awesome.

If this is about helping teams build better Playstation games that eek every bit of performance out of the PS5 and PS4 Pro (and even the PS4), then this sounds pretty solid.

If this is about helping teams port their PS games to PC, then I'm less enthusiastic. I don't care about that so much - but having a different team focus on it, so the teams creating games aren't worrying about PC ports during development, that might be useful.

@get2sammyb You Know If Sony Was Going To Jump Head First Into PC Gaming Like This Then They Should Have Kept SOE At Least Then They Could Have Had a Studio With Experience Making MMO's.....

Nothing to see here. Yawn...

@naruball Say it out loud to yourself. It works. In life, I bet you are annoying as hell. Good job, grammar nazi.

@ChrisDeku That isn't always true. Nixxes always handled all of the day 1 releases of PC port while Crystal Dynamic handled the console version. The main developer alot of the time actually doesn't handle PC ports of games unless they are PC focused developer. Usually they leave a second studio to do the port. While the main team does the console ports.

@render What you're basically asking for is just a console. The whole point of PC is the dealing with Windows and drivers, tinkering... etc. If you take that away, you're basically just left with an Xbox...

You can't have the that ease of use and still have the freedom what PC offers.

Having a tech team like Nixxes is only a good thing, being them helping to port games over to PC or working on improving PS5 games.

@Floki No that's not what I'm asking for at all, we already have that. What I'm suggesting is something that combines the best of both worlds. The ease of use of a console coupled with the upgradability of a PC. With that setup then you could get new features by adding a new graphics card or upgrading the internal drive etc. The parts wouldn't be proprietary so you'd be able to buy an off the shelf AMD or Nvidia card, that way the prices are competitive. The PS eco system would be extended onto the PC so you'd have things like the PS store etc, and potentially even the ability to side load things too. For people who are just into gaming and want a streamlined experience then it means you don't need that other all purpose OS.

Edit: And just to add to that, not everyone who might be into PC gaming wants to tinker but might want to have the cool new shiny stuff.

@Tharsman
Yeah, just major 'in your dreams' thinking on my part there. To be fair though if anyone was to acquire all of Sega I'd rather it be Nintendo because for its entirety I can't see Sony or Microsoft doing justice by their IP's.

Still, Sega is doing just fine on their own fortunately.

This should be good news for the people who were worried about Sony using their studios for PC ports rather then for PS5/4 related things.

@get2sammyb if you announce business with a hint of what's in the works that'd get the fanbase hyped. If as you say, news like this would only be interesting from a business perspective, then Sony might as well just send internal memos, rather than post it on social media.

@render The closet thing to this would something likes MAC... But like I said, you lose that PC freedom, and you would have to deal with that proprietary hardware so a massive increase in price. There is no such thing as "best of both" worlds.

That PC freedom upgradability is what cause the OS issues and dealing with drivers. Even if you boil a OS to be bare bones, you'll still up dealing with driver issue cause Nvidia and AMD are both inconsistent with their driver stability

It either console or PC, no middle ground, and if there was a middle ground it would be what Xbox aka not completely a consoles, nor completely a PC.

@Floki Yes I can see your point about the Mac but I still think that's a little proprietary for what I'm thinking. I think that there would be some sort of certification program for components but that they would be PC parts, in the same way that Sony are certifying the M2 drives that we will be allowed to install in our PS5s. That way you don't have all the hassle that you get with PC as you are 99% certain that something is going to work with it.

Basically what I want is for someone to take away all that hassle for me and provide me with some options so that I can upgrade beyond what my machine is currently capable of but without having to wait for the next major revision of hardware.

Hey someone can dream right?

Atlus is owned by SEGA, so the chance of an acquisition is highly unlikely. SEGA will remain independent for a long time to come.

Herman on a purchasing spree lately. Love it

@BRUTALSAM
I mean we knew more ports were coming so it's a sensible idea to have an experienced studio instead of burying the traditional teams with updates and fix work for those. The less time they spend porting old games the better.
I believe they may even work on an original game.

@TheFrenchiestFry
I was listening to Moore's law s dead with Colin as a guest and they both seem certain BluePoint is remaking MGS.
Idk, I always take rumour very cautiously but that is the latest rumour I know of.
Edit
Interesting listen if you have the chance.
Edit 2
Of course not it's not confirmed. I don't get that part of your reply

Oh yeah! Bring Sonys games to steam! I can't be faffed waiting or searching for a PS5 this gen. PC was my goto fix.

I'm guessing Nixxes has already been working on some of these upcoming ports, Sony typically doesn't acquire random teams. It's weird though, I thought Square Enix owned Nixxes already since they only ever did work with Eidos.

Gotta love how Jim Ryan said you shouldn't buy studios like Xbox instead nurture and build them and then PS starts a shopping spree anyway. Talk about hypocrisy.

But possibility of library of PS coming to PC is always good news even if it is not day 1 releases.

@GADG3Tx87 I dont know, Nintendo might actually use Sonic, and use it well, but they are famous for abandoning IP left and right.

Microsoft might still have to prove themselves under the new administration, but so far, they seem to be doing it right by just allowing the studios to work on the stuff they like.

The Nixxes Software joining PlayStation Studios move is really about PC porting. If Jim or Hermen are out there saying otherwise, they're gaslighting you. You should know by now what these two are about.

Obviously, their main priority will be porting, whether it be Playstation games to Steam or old versions of games to the PS5.

I also kind of hope they have a longterm role in making older Playstation games compatible on the PS5 and maybe Steam too. I know this is a silly wish, but I am always hopeful for some legacy support.

@QBGaming12 Koei Tecmo would be a brilliant buy, can it happen?

The people who are saying this is just about porting Playstation games to PC can’t see the forest for the trees. A team at Guerrilla Games had to spend months porting Horizon: Zero Dawn to PC.

You give Nixxes the task now for porting older PS4 games to PC, now that team can be free to work on PS5 exclusives and release them faster. Nixxes will free up other Playstation Studios which will in turn improve output for console players. Everybody wins.

Im calling Square-Enix by next gen