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twintail on 26 March 2026
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BraLoD said:
Kyuu said:

Japan Studio was awesome. The part I hated the most about their closure was that it happened so quietly like it wasn't even worth announcing...

Other studio closures are usually accompanied by acknowledgment of developers talent and contribution, but not in this case. They silently murdered them behind the scenes, and kept their brightest kid (Asobi). Things went south when Fumito Ueda left, and it was all but over when Keiichiro Toyama left. It felt like a smaller version of my dear Konami's fall into irrelevance...

I understand the closure though. As brilliant as they were, their output deteriorated over the years, and they didn't produce enough million sellers, let alone mega popular titles. Their most relevant internally developed games before Astro Bot were Ape Escape and Shadow of the Colossus. The biggest title they were involved with is Bloodborne.

As far as I'm concerned, SotC and Bloodborne are in the "top 10 of all time" tier.

By 2012 or 2013 a guy from Santa Monica, if I recall it right, was tasked to help some studios get back on their feet, and Japan Studio was one of them.

Again, if I recall it right, the guy was worried about what he saw there, lots of bright ideas, but no direction whatsoever, everybody would just do what they wanted how they wanted and things just weren't moving anywhere.

By this time they were releasing stuff like Gravity Rush and Puppeter, both games that found love by players but not commercial success, they still had a lot time to work things out, in all of this The Playroom gave life to the Bots and eventually Astro Bot and they were still able to put out what people say is the best PS VR game in Astro Bot Rescue Mission, but I think Sony gave up on them by the time Gravity Rush 2 failed. Astro Bot Rescue Mission still garnered huge critical reception after that but by that point Sony might only have changed their minds about them as they lived on (gladly).

I'll be honest tho, Sony has funded so much shit with insane amounts of cash after closing Japan Studio, bought and opened studios to just close them down, and with a tiny fraction of that Japan Studio could still be living to this day...

Yeah. The issue with Japan Studio is that their working style favoured the type of game budgets we saw for PS1/ PS2/ PSP and Vita. As long as someone has a working idea, they could just get a team together and start working.

But the issue is that game budgets increased, so this style of working doesn't work. Games need more people, cost more and therefore need higher returns. I think 2013 was really the year we started to see the shift from Japan Studio with Puppeteer, but more realistically Knack and the PS4. 

As much Japan Studio being closed still sucks, I don't think it's surprising. None of their internally big games were commercial successes outside of Astro Bot VR. So it's no wonder they basically did a reboot and kept Asobi and moved the external team to Xdev.

Even if they had kept Japan Studio around, I don't think the output you see today would be any different: their main work would've been more or less the same. They would've been connected to Rise of Ronin, Tokon and Death Stranding (which is what Xdev are), and they would've release Astro Bot (which Asobi did). Even Maybe we would have another first party game from then, but there's no way of knowing.