Sony Bend is a great studio. They made two of the best games on the PSP and have so far made a great title fo the Vita. Closing down their most talented handheld studio is a bad idea.

Ok, perhaps you're right in this regard, Sony don't have many good studios working on portables. I still think London and Cambridge should merge or something, I don't think their output has been that great.

In Sony's defense, Killzone was never meant to be one of their flagship franchises. There's a reason they didn't go all out with the marketing.

About LBP2, I agree. But if there were technical problems with the game, you can't really blame Sony, blame Media Molecule.

About Uncharted, I disagree. Uncharted is kind of a niche game. I say for an Adventure game is sold extremely well. It's the current-gen Tomb Raider. What Uncharted really needs to go completely mainstream, is a hollywood movie.(a good one)

About Poly, completely agree. Sony needs to be strict and enforce deadlines.

About Team Ico, I agree. But as loved as their PS2 games were, they never sold that well. These aren't the types of games you rush since they are all about artistic vision.

About London Studio, I think they just didn't want to be competing with their own IP. They already have tons of exclusives.

About Santa Monica, I disagree. They have a hand in almost every PS3 exclusive. Just this year alone I count Starhawk, Journey and some other PSN game I forgot about. The point is that they are making God of War games, but they are also helping out other studios. They don't have the resources to make a new IP. Anyway we got a new God of War coming in 2013. I'm really looking forward to it.

About Sucker Punch, well since Sony bought them, they are probably restructuring. What About Festival of Blood? Wasn't that released while being owned by Sony?

I don't know if you can attribute all of these failures to Sony. That being said, I largely agree with your general sentiment. Also, LittleBigPlanet on the PSP is not a port, it is an entirely new game. I think it's a pretty big failure on behalf of Sony's marketing department that so few are aware of this fact.

Edit: Also, I think that it's an incredibly stupid idea to suggest Sony shut down or alter Bend Studios in any way, shape or form. Even though I despise Retribution I think that their Syphon Filter titles are the best games in the entire series by a wide margin; among the best games on the system; among the best stealth action games ever made.

Polophony is a different kettle of fish than the other studios although owned by Sony , after GT's success it was turned into a wholly owned subsidiary  with their own board of directors , hence when you go to their website you will see it contains polophony's amount of capitalisation ,names of directors etc it is also why they  list there sales on the site.

I agree to a point.

One of the biggest problems SCE worldwide studios faced at the beginning of this generation was coping with the hardware Sony had created for them to work with. It's really one if the biggest, if not the single biggest factor that hindered the PS3 in it's first few years, coupled of course with a ridiculous price point.

I mean the significance of the PS3's architecture cannot be overstated, it was literally a nightmare for developers to work with, both internally and for third parties. As a result some ports were scrapped entirely, and many that made it to the machine were poorly running games with a host of technical problems.

Even Uncharted, with the ICE team on board and the wizards at ND was reportedly agonizing to make. ND saw plenty of developers leave and the end result was a game that didn't exactly fulfill ND's vision. It took a few more years of experience with the PS3 to produce something like Uncharted 2.

I'd imagine PD underwent some serious growing pains as well, despite what looks on the surface to be perhaps a slightly poor focus and direction for the title, I believe a huge part of Sony's flagship title seeing such a late release is down to the complexity of the hardware and the jump the studio had to make to the next gen.

The same can be said for Infamous, you only have to look at the first and second release to see SP had finally mastered the hardware after 4 years of work on it.

The Last Guardian still hasn't even released.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, while Sony may not have directed resources as efficiently as they could have, or chosen the right direction for certain studios, the root of Sony's problems lies squarely at the feet of the PS3's hardware. It crippled Sony's software portfolio early in the gen, it lowered their third party support and it meant releasing each machine for a huge loss which no doubt financially impacted their future marketing budget. It even saw them release some titles early (Heavenly Sword and Lair spring to mind) they simply needed something to push out onto the market.

As far as diversity, for some studios after the massive initial investment and astronomical man hours spent creating an engine for a game probably meant Sony were more likely to greenlight a direct sequel, even if the first game had only produced a minimal profit, rather than risk the prolonged expensive development of a new IP. This may have been the case for GG for example.

Hopefully with a much more accessible machine to work with next gen, we'll see more regular releases from key studios, more diversity in the releases and perhaps with a higher return from Sony's first party as a result of a faster turnaround, larger resources devoted to marketing.

I can agree with you on these 5 studios mismanagement but not others.

Naughty Dog is certainly Sony's shining sword at the moment. Great sales, great reviews, and great fanbase. God of War has done fairly well this gen overall with 3 being the best seller in the series, the HD collection pulling in 2.5 million customers, with only the PSP ports not performing well at all on retail, but that could possibly be due to PSN sales. It'll be interesting to see how the next one does after the PSP collection failed.

Poly is a strange case, yeah it took forever to release, but you know what? Prologue sold 4 million+ lifetime and GT5 is the best selling PS3 exclusive ever. They sold about 9.6 million copies under the GT5 brand in total. I think the only failure is letting these devs become overly ambitious. I agree in that you can't let devs take forever, but at the same time, that investment more than paid off, but it somewhat dinged the reputation of gran turismo a tad bit as the game didn't turn out to be as great as people thought it would be and Forza gaining a very strong position racing game IPs this gen.

As for Killzone, while it's true KZ is far from taking the FPS crown, you gotta admit that Sony/GG saved this IP. The original killzone was just a flat out failure on the PS2, but turned into a lucrative franchise that sold three times what the original did. Hell, even the PSP game outsold the original Killzone. Sony did good on supporting this franchise. It's not Halo, but it'll make them money just as long as they don't go crazy with the budget, unless we get 4 as a PS4 launch title.

Resistance on the other hand? A pipedream that's sunk to the bottom of the ocean. It started out great, but the follow up was a critical stinker that sold based on the first games reputation while the third one was a critical darling but sold on the second one's reputation. I don't have any hopes for the PSV game either.

Sony should've definitely released LBP2 at holidays, I agree 100% right there. Skylanders and Disney Universe show off the wonders a holiday availability can do for a game. Can't say I have much of a argument towards anything else other than a reluctant nod.

Although I agree with everything else that you said I have to point out the fact that critically, Resistance 2 was actually the best recieved game in that series. Also, despite the extremely vocal detractors, I absolutely agree with the critics on this one. Personally, I'm wary of buying Resistance 3 because of how poorly Insomniac supported R2's competitive multiplayer.

Well Uncharted was considered a flop though selling horrible the first weeks it was launched. It simply had legs and that was unexpected for most of the vg crowd then.