Sony Interactive Entertainment President and CEO, Jim Ryan, has mentioned that the corporate has more studio acquisitions deliberate, over and above people who have already been introduced in 2021 and 2022.
Ryan mentioned the acquisitions in a current look on the PlayStation podcast (through VGC), saying, “We’re in a really good place with PlayStation Studios right now and have been for the past few years. The critical success and the commercial success of the games that they’ve been making […] that has given us permission to invest heavily in content creation.”Ryan went on so as to add, “We’re growing our studios organically and we’re growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021, we’re in discussions with Bungie and we have more planned. This is getting us into a cycle, a virtuous cycle, where success begets success.”
Sony’s most up-to-date acquisition of Haven Studios was announced solely final month. That was the second main acquisition of 2022 for the corporate, preceded by the acquisition of Future creator, Bungie, in January. Even earlier than that, all through 2021 Sony acquired 5 studios: Valkyrie Entertainment, Housemarque, Bluepoint, Firesprite, and Nixxes.
This isn’t the primary time Ryan has been fairly up entrance about Sony’s intentions round snapping up studios. Following the announcement of the corporate’s intention to amass Bungie in January 2022, for example, he informed GamesIndustry.biz, "We should absolutely expect more. We are by no means done. With PlayStation, we have a long way to go.”
Evaluation: Laying groundwork
It looks like a reasonably busy, future-gazing time for Sony for the time being, with these studio acquisitions being an enormous a part of laying the groundwork for that future. Although we do not know which studios Sony has its eyes on subsequent, it appears possible that it will be a studio that may assist it with its plans for PlayStation as others have been. We all know, for instance, that Sony is trying to make an enormous push into dwell service video games, with a promise to launch 10 dwell service titles by 2026. These new video games haven’t been explicitly detailed, however PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst informed GamesIndustry.biz that the corporate has "quite a few now in development or conceptualization". That’s to not say, although, that we’ll cease seeing high-quality single-player experiences on PlayStation; final month PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst reaffirmed Sony's dedication to single-player video games, telling GamesIndustry.biz that though the corporate is making an enormous push into dwell service for the time being, "Clearly we are going to at all times keep it up making these single-player narrative-based video games akin to Ghost of Tsushima, The Final of Us, and Horizon Forbidden West.” Earlier this month, Sony additionally introduced its new, three-tier model of PlayStation Plus which is because of launch in June 2022. In contrast to Xbox Recreation Go, this new PlayStation Plus service gained’t have the corporate’s new first-party releases on day one as a part of the subscription. Ryan additionally touched on this in his interview on the PlayStation podcast, saying that “putting these games into a subscription service immediately upon their release would break this virtuous circle, and we wouldn’t be able to invest in the way that we’re currently able to. So we’re not doing it. We’re going to stick to the approach that we have and has served us well under many years now.”
