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Cerebralbore101 on 28 July 2025
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BraLoD said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

What's going to happen here is that Sony will slowly shrink and then close their 1st party studios since some part of Sony's leadership has deemed them "unnecessary". Sony's corporate leadership has taken the same braindead position as Phil Spencer by thinking "I could make the greatest game of all time and it wouldn't move console sales one bit". Once you start thinking that way 1st party games take a backseat to whatever other nonsense you are doing. It's already started happening. Bend Studio got its game canceled. Insomniac had layoffs despite Spiderman 2 selling insanely well. The Gravityrush team was let go. Naughty Dog hasn't made a game since 2019. Media Molecule is pretty much dead.

It's so frustrating to see such non-competition between Sony and MS. It's a two horse race and there's no penalty for coming in second anymore. Anything Xbox does to make their brand worse Sony will copy because where else are high-end console players going to go? It's similar to how the Republican and Democratic parties work in the USA. Republicans plan to increase the national debt by 100%. Democrats counter by saying they will only increase the national debt by 95%. A few years later Republicans say they will increase the national debt by 180%. Democrats then decide that they will only increase it by 175%. So you have this non-competitive two man race to the bottom.

Thank God for Nintendo, Indies, and quirky Japanese 3rd party devs. That's where creativity will come from in this industry.

I think you are missing and mixing some stuff there.

Sony cancelled a lot of games because those were live service games that after the Concord fiasco were found to be likely to fail as well, so stopping them right there was more cost efficient that wasting more money to complete and release them and fail regardless. Some of these studios had to start new game projects and that takes years, that's why they had no games launched. That has nothing to do with Sony not wanting to make games themselves anymore, actually there is not even a single hint about it anywhere, even this whole thing is because Sony is pursuing to develop more games for and beyond Playstation. They stupiditly put far too many of their studios efforts on chasing live services games so they could have their Fortnite, Call of Duty, Overwatch, etc, and failed miserably on it, that is it.

Just look at the last state of plays, Sony is, as it has always been doing, developing high quality games and using them as big showings for the brand. Nothing has changed there. At least up until now, and I see no indicator it is changing as well. Almost every year or two Sony has some of the most acclaimed games being released out there, look at the goty awards, and that is even considering so many cancelled games and lost dev time.

I think it's a case of Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, Insomniac, Santa Monica, and Sucker Punch being vestigial to Sony at this point. If they make high-selling games, then Sony is happy with that. If they don't, then Sony gives them the axe without any attempt to fix the studio and moves on. Similar to what is happening to Bend Studio or what MS did to the Forza Motorsport team. Hopefully, these teams will remain stable for another decade, but if they enter troubled waters, Sony won't be as likely to come to their rescue as they would have in the past. Geurilla started as a mediocre studio and was slowly built up into a fantastic studio over 12 years. I don't think Sony has that kind of commitment to quality games anymore. Basically, 2025 Sony has the same blasé approach to making good games as MS. They just happen to have better homegrown studios than MS. Those studios are left over from the PS1-PS4 days when they actually cared.