| Heavenly_King said: I think that Sony is realized that sooner, and invested a lot of money in the 1st party studios. The Monster Hunter SONY version is Soul Sacrifice. Japanese gaming crowd is a bit xenophobic with western created IPs. So a japanase studio needs to create the game in order to it be a success in Japan. And on the case of RPGs, considering that Legend of Dragoon is the best selling 1st party PSONE classic, and that is rumored that Dart is on PSASBR, I bet a Legend of Dragoon game is being in the works. if Sony invests as much in that game as with God of War or Uncharted, Sony will have AAA title that will sell lots of PS3/VITAS. Sony tried that with White Knight, but it did not go as planned. It was not bad, but it has not that quality and polishment of Uncharted and God of War games. I think Sony should buy READY AT DAWN and HIGH IMPACT GAMES NOW!!!!!, and put them to create a new IPs VITA. Ideally RAD also should make GOW game for the VITA. Lets hope Sony finds a way to create iconic AAA franchises in each genre :D |
About 6 months ago, I'd have agreed with everything you posted here. I wanted Sony to buy more first party studios, create more great experiences, have more franchises on the go etc. etc.
I don't feel that way anymore though.
The thing Sony needs to start doing is saving money. Buying a studio and having to pay the wages for say, 100 new employees, isn't going to save them any money. They can't even afford to keep fantastic studios like Liverpool open, so I don't think they need to be buying any more.
The way they're doing things now, imo, is a much better strategy. Have their core studios (Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, Media Molecule, Guerrilla) create the big IP's (Uncharted, God of War, LittleBigPlanet, Killzone). They hand off the development duties to smaller, third-party studios (Ready at Dawn for God of War, Tarsier for LittleBigPlanet).
This way, they get the best of both worlds. They get profit from the game & pay the costs, but aren't investing huge amounts of money in a studio they can't sustain. And the smaller studios get sustained work from Sony if they do a good job with their IP's (i.e. Ready at Dawn, High Impact).
I'm also enjoying how Sony take the IP's from their bigger devs and hand them to the smaller devs for the portable games too. Like Studio Cambridge did LBP PSP, Sony Bend did Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Which makes me all the more pissed off that Studio Liverpool shut. Just give them fucking Gran Turismo Vita, Motorstorm Vita, Infamous Vita. ANYTHING like that. Fools.
edit: Although, one thing I think they DEFINITELY need to do is open a new studio in Japan. Japan Studio isn't enough on it's own (Polyphony don't really count since they're just GT machines). I think opening a dedicated JRPG studio over there would be an excellent step.
