Sony is reportedly hitting its oldest internal developer. According to VGC, the company has not yet renewed the contracts of many of its employees at Japan Studio. The developer is best known for his work on franchises such as Gravity Rush, Ape Escape and Knack, as well as helping with Bloodthirsty, The Last Guardian and the recent Demon’s Souls remake. Some parts of the studio, including the team working on Sony’s Astro Bot franchise, will continue to work for the company, but due to its sound, Sony has been separated from most other staff.
2 ‘SIE JAPAN Studio’ has not been released yet.
I am leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment at the end of this month. I continue to work hard on creating games. Thank you so much to everyone! pic.twitter.com/WPpiLpCtoY– aak éš› 眞 晃 Masaaki Yamagiwa (@giwamasa) 25 February 2021
Recent tweets from various people who worked at the studio seems to confirm VGCs reporting. The move follows after several prominent employees, including Gravity Rush, and the director of Silent Hill, Teruyuki Toriyama and Bloodthirsty manufacturer Masaaki Yamagiwa, left the company late last year. We asked Sony for comment, and we will update this article when we hear from the company.
VGC suggests that Sony’s decision to close Japan Studio stems from the fact that the developer has not been profitable for the past few years. In November Bloomberg published a report saying that many of Sony’s development teams have been reduced over the past few months. According to the publication, the feeling at Sony Interactive Entertainment’s US division was that the company did not need games that “only perform well in Japan.”
Updated 20:37 ET: Sony has confirmed that it is reorganizing Japan Studio. “In an effort to further strengthen its business operations, SIE can confirm that PlayStation Studios will reorganize JAPAN Studio into a new organization on April 1,” a company spokesman told Engadget. JAPAN Studio will once again focus on Team ASOBI, the creative team behind it Astro’s playroom, so that the team can concentrate on a single vision and build on the popularity of Astro’s GAMES. The company added that it will focus most of its localization, IP management and external production efforts on its PlayStation Studios brand.