Reaction: Sony Has Quietly But Confidently Grown Its First-Party Lineup

And they haven't done it in one console generation by buying an already huge, well established studio to play catch-up because they neglected 1st party gaming for the last decade . Sony have spent years developing relationships and nurturing talent slowly turning 2nd party studios into 1st party.

I know they all but confirmed an acquisition for Blue Point, but what are they working on or rumored to be working on?

@Shepherd_Tallon indeed.

there used to be ton's of talk of sony doing nothing but tbh reflecting on this,it is the opposite to me.

a sleeing giant waking up indeed.

2 decent 2 not so decent

It's a tough choice but if I had to pick one I'd say Housemarque. All these studios sharing ideas though should lead to some amazing output.

@Rafie something new. 'New content' was the phrasing.

@StylesT which 2 are not 'decent' ?

Need another voting option, none. I don't think I've played anything from any of those developers, nothing of interest from them.

Exciting news and a fantastic studio!
How often was I told that Sony wouldn't promote such news because it's purely business?
https://youtu.be/3OH977tutoE

Next up ember labs.word up son

@Integrity Thank you. Also I didn't read the other article confirming the acquisition.

Level 5 to make exclusive quality JRPG's next please Sony

I'm definitely most interested in Bluepoint the most of all of these new devs. Ive only liked Dead Nation from Housmarque so far so I'm not too interested in them. Nixxes will at least free up the teams from needing to spend time on ports so that's nice. Firesprite is definitely a wild card not sure how to feel obout them yet without seeing what they are up to.

Anyway the 1st party has already been pretty strong before these teams joined so it will be interesting to see how the new devs make their mark.

I love how yall included the PC port team in the pole, lol.

I think Sony is heading into the right direction with their three major purchases. I believe their still going to need to continue this trend if they are going to compete with MS down the road. I know Playstation fans love to act like Sony owns the exclusive market rn, but theirs a storm brewing at MS and in a few years those HUGE purchases are going to start paying off. With the number of studios they have I could see MS putting six to seven exclusives out a year...thats hard to match. Hopefully Sony continues to make these purchases and can stay competitive down the road.

They've been quiet about what they've been buying.

Not Nintendo quiet when it comes to acquisitions, they don't even tweet about it or do posts on their websites: that stays strictly to corporate press releases and someone noticing on the yearly employee count that the number of subsidiaries bumped up by 1.

At least Sony tells the world about it? No huge song and dance, but it's known. A middle of the road approach.

Excellent article. I agree that firesprite may have the most potential to become a very prolific studio.
Only bit I find really annoying is that trend to qualify a video game as an 8/10 game or an 9/10 game. Not a personal critic at the author since many gamers use that expression but how silly is it really? 🙄🤦🤦
I feel like the prisoner. They are not numbers they are video games haha.
A game quality doesn’t translate into a number. A number is the snapshot of an instant from a certain point of view. It doesn’t reflect the reality.

@Rob_230 if only for Dark Cloud 3, right?! I mean, I've had 2 kids since Dark Cloud 2 and the release of Dark Cloud 3 would be the 3rd best thing to happen to me since the release of Dark Cloud 2. MAKE IT HAPPEN SONY!

@AhmadSumadi I am one of the biggest Dark Cloud 2 fans in the world. There was a period when I was hoping for Dark Cloud 3 at every E3.

Between the restructuring of Japan Studio into Team Asobi and Level-5 moving away from publishing games in the west, it's pretty clear Dark Cloud 3 is never going to happen.

Nixxes, that one seemingly came completely out of left field, but it's excellent and welcome news for us primarily PC players.

Housemarque, Bluepoint, and Firesprite I would say were all as inevitable purchases as Sucker Punch, Insomniac, and Naughty Dog.

This is what people completely and utterly fail to understand about Sony's strategy and MS' strategy. MS skipped the line and just cut a check for a whole bucket of devs/IP they have nothing to do with (not hatin', if you can do that, hey, more power to ya). Sony fosters incredibly strong relationships with studios for years, decades even, before acquiring them and 99% of the time, the studios they decide to make 1st party have been making PS exclusives, exclusively.

I've given Sony a lot of well-deserved crap over the past year or so, but I think they've done a great job bringing in new blood since the Insomniac purchase.

Mostly Western companies, which is interesting to see with MS praising the Japanese gaming community today/yesterday.

Like a role reversal.

It's 1 and 1a. between Housemarque and Bluepoint, both, as mentioned, are known quantities. The most intriguing is Firesprite, I'm interested to see what that studio brings over time now that it has Sony's full backing The Persistence is a decent game, with access to more resources, its next game could be real winner.

@playstation1995 well is kena is anything to go by they would be a welcome addition

@AhmadSumadi Dark Cloud 3 Rouge Galaxy 2 And Maybe a Reboot Of White Knight Chronicles Would Be Great.

Guys...think about this.

We know that Amazon, Google, Netflix, tencent, Disney at least all megahuge companies(maybe with the exception of Netflix) want a presence in interactive entertainment. With ps5 flying and vr2 coming out next year, I think it would be highly encumbent of any these companies to merge with Sony. Also as Sony keeps snapping up talent and producing great games this can't have gone unnoticed while Microsoft try to rupture the entire industry with their new world order. Thoughts?

Housemarque, Nixxes, Firesprite/Fabrik, Bluepoint.

It’s clear that Hermen Hulst and Jim Ryan have a more strategic approach to their acquisition strategies that I have no doubt will pay off huge in the long run. They don’t have to take away longtime major publishers or established IP from anyone in the process.

New Aaa japan studio also is also going to be aquire by the g.o.a.t sony 👑.word up son

I haven’t played Returnal, but I love arcade games so Housemarque will always be a developer I support whatever they make.

As a fan of Japanese games however, I weep for Playstation’s first-party lineup, and think their Golden Age of development is behind us, not ahead. Team Asobi aside, there’s not too much for me to get excited about.

@Rafie so on my linked in I just saw that sony has officially done just that

@playstation1995 Sony Needs To Grab Level 5 Especially Considering They Closed Their North American Offices.

@KayOL77 The New World Order is here bud... “_____ as a Service” is the name of the game for all the companies you mentioned. It would behoove none of them to buy Sony. They all profit inside Sony’s ecosystem, and as far as IP goes, the only one valuable enough for those companies you mentioned to even bother with is “Playstation”, which becomes worth about as much as “Atari” is now without Sony driving it.

Do you really think Microsoft is “evil”, or is that just fanboy talk? I’ve always gone back and forth over the years as they ebb and flow with power, but current Microsoft is pretty benign compared to previous incarnations... they are straight angels compared to the companies you mentioned, at the very least as far as privacy and “data dignity” are concerned, and XBox today to me looks like more like a liberating force for creatives and the “hoi polloi” with their disruptive model rather than a “New World Order” like GaaS and the expensive walled gardens like Sony and Nintendo.

@Areus. Yes level 5 is a must.ni no kuni and rogue galaxy etc.word up son

@Ken_Kaniff I think the potential is there for Microsoft, but they have a ways to go to prove they can manage their studios. Bethesda will be fine, as I think they will be left to do their thing. All the other MS studios are “wait and see.” MS does not have a great track record with their 1st parties. Halo Infinite is looming HUGE for them.

A calm and steady build up. Everything they bought makes sense.

I wish they buy Ember Lab.

Not just Kena, but maybe they can even help out Sony Pictures Animation Studio.

@Spiders The new world order statement is in relation to the term 'poverty management' which I think Bill gates coined. You make everything cheaper and too good to be true, then you help lower the economics strength of the globe. 'You will own NOTHING and be HAPPY'

Im sorry, the last thing I see is Microsoft being benevolent. That's a very convenient face and I do not buy it.

The point regarding the merger, if another big company allows more financial freedom for Sony Playstation division that could be a boon for both in a world of interactive entertainment in which it looks like Microsoft is want to dominate if not outright own. The point here is competition is best. Sony are doing a remarkable job of keeping a company 25x their size on their toes. But we can't kid ourselves. Microsoft have unlimited lives in this world, and it looks like if Microsoft were to dominate a gen at this stage there would be no Sony Playstation.

@Spiders

I like expensive walled gardens. Keeps the riff-raff out (GaaS in this context). Give me $70 games over microtransaction-infested service titles that are half finished at launch. Hope Microsoft ditches that microtransaction philosophy too whenever they, uh... actually release a game. But something tells me their Gamepass model is going to rely heavily on GaaS titles and microtransactions going forward. Hope they prove me wrong, fingers crossed.

I'm not kidding myself that Sony are the "good guys", but yes - Microsoft is evil, in the way most corporations are evil. I don't want a game streaming service, I want good games. Two out of the three console manufacturers are delivering good games right now, one isn't and hasn't been for awhile.

Microsoft isn't liberating anybody. They are making a smart play, eating losses on Gamepass to capture more subscribers, at which point prices will shoot up dramatically, i.e. Netflix 2.0

Sony is just a brand of evil I can stomach a bit easier.

I wish they would make a song and dance out of it.

> Bought to help out with PC ports of older titles, there's no obvious benefit to those of a Sony persuasion.

There will be once the PC ports start having their own trophy list stacks

@KayOL77 maybe Amazon or Google could put together enough cash to buy Sony (as if Sony would agree to be sold, probably have to try for a hostile takeover). Highly doubtful Netflix, Tencent, or Disney could.

And I'm not sure what benefit Sony would get from merging with one of these companies, probably too much risk of losing autonomy.

bluepoint , house and firesprite all got me excited to see what they are going to do i'd throw in asobi too. give them some new ip's to work on, that will give them a pretty great first party line up.

@eltomo Sony has really close ties to SE and Sega, so they don't necessarily need to buy their own studio. Microsoft needed to.

@KayOL77 I understand what you’re saying ... especially regarding the “Great Reset” angle of no ownership and cheap services as an issue — and that’s really why I add the caveat “for now” — but I don’t see the connection to the current state of gaming.

Firstly, “owning” games has become semantics since digital. Physical copies are just “keys” for digital software, with a courtesy copy of a 1.0 version. You own what you can sell, and the industry has been trying to subvert used game sales forever. The effort to make physical, content complete 1.0 games obsolete is industry-wide and is baked into the cake. Gamepass doesn’t really affect it, aside from a public willingness or acceptance to get the savings for the deal. The fact that a digital copy costs the same as a physical copy is utterly ridiculous, and we all know it.

Second, and more importantly, game rentals have always been a part of gaming (in most countries) and never warranted the “new world order” overtones. How is Gamepass different in effect? Low commitment from players, but now game makers get a cut.

Tagging in @UnlimitedSevens as this dovetails into my reply to them:

I owned nothing and was happy for most of my childhood, renting games every weekend, and when I bought games, I bought RPGs only because playtime was the paramount metric of value. The increasing investment costs to players have in turn made every full-price release turn into an RPG-lite to pad playtimes. The full price business model has affected design choices, especially in the risk-averse AAA space. That’s really where I mean the term “liberate”, even if it’s being done by accident.

I like a good walled garden too.. I went from Android to Apple because I’m happy to pay for better respect of privacy and data. I also have zero love for corporations, and think they are legal golems humanity created and the worst mistake it’s ever made, and begrudgingly accept that we choose lesser evils every day to participate in society. I’m only defending Microsoft in the context of the analogy that @KayOL77 brought in that I think was misused or inappropriate, where Sony being bought by the companies actually doing the nefarious stuff like amazon, Google, etc., somehow don’t represent a New World Order but Microsoft does for reasons I still suspect are fanboyism.

I think it’s the reason is more straightforward than many think. Sony doesn’t buy studios to compete in an arm race or for fear that others snatch them so to speak. It has to make sense from a business perspective and from a game development perspective. The company invest in studios that will print money. Playstation and the teams become more efficient. The studio doesn’t need to grow develop more structure because PlayStation provides them and all the teams collaborate.

@Spiders

I see what you are saying. I guess my reply wasn't really addressing your point and I agree completely. I definitely will be adding the term "legal golems" to my lexicon though haha.

For a while it looked like the industry was heading towards a sort of hegemony, where you could play any games anywhere. However, it feels like this generation more than any other will be the generation where exclusives are the kingmakers. I'm glad to have all 3 consoles, for the first in fact, but feel for those who can't as whichever you choose it feels like you'll miss out on a massive amount for the next few years.

The only exception seems to be PC - perhaps the savviest thing would be to just get a PC and Switch. Unfortunately, I really can't stand playing on PC!

Probably alone here but would love to see Sony but TT games, yes I love Lego games and the bonus levels we’ve had on PlayStation have been a good addition.

People can say what they want, but their strategy has been working for a while.

I mean.....they have gotten a lot more of Insomniac in 2 years than Microsoft from Rare in 20 🤷‍♂️ (and even paid less).

None of them. They are not exclusives anymore to be happy about focusing their development on a fixed platform.

Definitely interested in seeing what Bluepoint has in store for us, now that they're working on an original title. As mentioned in the article, there's no telling yet whether that's a wholly new IP or a new entry to an existing one. Me? I'd like to see them tackle a new Killzone game.

Sony delivers what Microsoft is promising. They make their games run great on their video game platform. It is a smart move, the development of the so called "system sellers". Smart, but not new. It is what saved Netflix, the development of their own series. Sony is in a good position because now they have a lot of teams working to extract the best of their system. But then again, Microsoft also do. What is lacking for Sony is their own fantasy western RPG game, which is why I think this is a perfect fit for the next Bluepoint game.