Great fit for Playstation! Returnal reminds me a lot of Doom: Eternal in terms of tight, frantic, arcade gameplay. Another in house studio that Sony might expand into two teams. 

They worked with Eugene Jarvis and a film documentary crew on Nex Machina. Not as small as you think.

An interesting interview with the studio director and Herman Hulst said they want to make bigger and more ambitious titles and are planning on expanding.

Ilari Kuittinen: "Returnal is kind of a stepping stone for us. When we’re thinking about the future titles, they’ll maybe be even bigger and even more ambitious."

Herman Hulst: They’ll be invited to forums such as a studio head forum, where we share a lot of initiatives, ideas and technology. It's hard for him to comment coming in from the outside on what he's going to benefit from, but I can tell you from experience it's going to be quite a lot. It's entirely voluntary. He gets to run his team, gets to maintain the culture and we’ll obviously protect that. But we're going to be able to offer a lot to Housemarque going forward.

Yeah, I noticed. I was unclear above. I meant to say that the logo should have been more to the center and not half cut off.

Dreams was actually my most played game last year. Such a shame it did not break through to mainstream audiences

If you contract someone to do something, you accept them doing it, as best they can.
If you own a studio, and they want to try to grow, your not just tossing away money to the benefit of another company, but instead building yourself up. I think it makes it easier to accept pushing in capital.

Atleast thats how I see it.
No doubt, next game from HouseMarque will been even more ambitious, and bigger.
I read on twitter that they are growing the size of the studio, with hires (more hands on deck) along with all the guideance/software/equiptment help ect from sony.

Its gonna result in bigger and better games from them in future.

^ case in point. 

"Stuido will be expanded"

Nice pickup for sure, exciting to see what they'll do with a bigger budget.

So when is the publisher buying spree going to end? Ir feels like every month a platform holder buys a new studio.

You're mainly think of MS. Sony has bought 2 studios in the last 2 years, each has mostly worked exclusively with them in the past before the acquisition. I suspect there will be more puchases (bluepoint and potentially emberlabs) but again these are teams that either have never worked on a multiplatform title or rarely do so. So no ones loss.

Longterm I think they're eyeing new studios that just recently formed versus buying out hugely established AAA studios.

Sony Japan leaked Bluepoint. They posted that pic but the Bluepoint logo instead. I think they since deleted it. So Probably not long until that's announced.

I bought it on release, played it for a bit then made the mistake of trying out the editor. That unfortunately turned me off the game, I couldn't even get the hang of moving the camera around in the editor.

It also has the problem of too much choice. What do you play, where do you start, how do you find the gems without feeling like you wasted an hour wading through mediocre stuff. Looking for good levels felt like work instead of fun and when you find one, the fun is usually over quickly.

That was at release though, no idea what it looks like now. I was always planning to come back for the VR part but haven't got to it yet.