Sony’s obsession with Blockbusters is causing unrest in the PlayStation Empire

Photographer: Roy Liu / Bloomberg

Visual Arts Services Group from Sony Corp. he has long been the boundless hero of many successful PlayStation video games. The San Diego operation helps complete games designed at other Sony-owned studios with animation, art, or other content and development. But about three years ago, a handful of influential figures in the visual arts services group decided they wanted to have more creative control and lead the game, rather than be supporting actors in popular titles like Spider-Man. and Uncharted.

Michael Mumbauer, who founded Visual Arts Service Group in 2007, recruited a group of about 30 people developers, both internally and from neighboring game studios, to form a new development unit within Sony. The idea was to expand on the most successful franchises of the company and the team began work on a remake of the 2013 hit The last of us for the PlayStation 5. But Sony has never fully acknowledged the team’s existence or given them the funding and support they need to succeed in the highly competitive video game market, according to those involved. The studio never took its own name. Instead, Sony transferred ownership of the remake of The Last of Us to its original creator, Naughty Dog, a Sony-owned studio behind many of the company’s best-selling games and a HBO television series under development.

Deflated, the leadership of the small group was largely disbanded, according to interviews with eight people familiar with the operation. Many, including Mumbauer, left the company altogether. Mumbauer declined to comment, and others asked not to be named discussing private information. A Sony representative declined to comment or give interviews.

The team’s failure highlights the complex hierarchy of video game development and, in particular, Sony’s conservative approach to creating games for the PlayStation 5. The Japanese conglomerate has about a dozens of studios around the world as part of its PlayStation Studios label, but in recent years it has given priority to games made by its most successful developers. Studios like Santa Monica, Naughty Dog in California and Guerrilla Games in Amsterdam spend tens of millions of dollars to make games with the expectation that investments will pay off exponentially. And usually. Impressions, including God of War from 2018 and The Last of Us Part II in 2020 is exclusively for PlayStation consoles, helping Sony sell some 114 million from the PS4. Rival Microsoft Corp. took the opposite approach, relying on a wide range of studios to power its Netflix, Xbox subscription service Game Pass, which allows users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a variety of games.

Sony’s focus on exclusive blockbusters has come at the expense of niche teams and PlayStation studios, leading to high revenue and fewer player choices. Last week, Sony reorganized a development office in Japan, leading to mass departures of people who worked on lesser-known but popular games, such as Gravity Rush and Everybody’s Golf. The company has informed the developers that it no longer wants to produce smaller games, which are successful only in Japan, Bloomberg reported.

This fix for results-producing teams creates unrest in Sony’s gaming studio portfolio. Based in Oregon Sony Bend, best known for the 2019 Days Gone open world action game, tried unsuccessfully to launch a sequel that year, according to people familiar with the proposal. Although the first game was profitable, its development was lengthy and the critical reception was mixed, so a Days Gone 2 was not seen as a viable option.

Instead, a studio team was assigned to help Naughty Dog with a multiplayer game, while a second group was assigned to work on a new Uncharted game under the supervision of Naughty Dog. Some employees, including top leaders, were unhappy with the arrangement and left. Bend’s developers feared that they might be absorbed by Naughty Dog, and the studio’s management demanded the removal of the Uncharted project. They received the wish last month and are now working on a new game of their own.

Emphasizing big hits can also be counterproductive, because sometimes games that start small can turn into massive hits. In 2020, Sony did not put too much marketing muscle behind the strange video game creation system Dreams, by Media Molecule, owned by PlayStation, in the UK. As a result, PlayStation may have missed its own version of Roblox, a similar video game tool. Parent company Roblox Corp. it went public earlier this year and is now valued at $ 45 billion.

For their first solo project, Mumbauer and his team wanted to launch something that would be well received by their Sony bosses. Recognizing the risks and expense of developing a new game from scratch, they decided to focus on rebuilding older games for the new PlayStation 5. Remakes are considered a safe bet, as it’s cheaper to upgrade and polish a game. old game than to start from scratch, and can be sold to both nostalgic old fans and curious new ones. The team initially planned a remake of the first Unknown game, released by Naughty Dog in 2007. The idea quickly faded because it would be expensive and require too much added design work. Instead, the team settled on a remake of Naughty Dog’s melancholy zombie hit from 2013, The Last of Us.

At the time, Naughty Dog was in full swing of the sequel, The Last of Us Part II, which would introduce higher fidelity graphics and new gameplay features. If Mumbauer’s crew remade the first game that looked similar, the two games could be packaged together for PlayStation 5. In theory, this would be a less expensive proposition than remaking Uncharted, because The Last of Us was more modern. and it wouldn’t require too many game revisions. Then, once Mumbauer’s group is established, they could continue to remake the first Uncharted game and other titles along the way.

But pivoting from doing finishing work for other games to creating your own is difficult because original development teams “compete with hundreds of other teams around the world with different levels of experience and success,” said Dave Lang. , the founder Iron Galaxy Studios, which served as a support team and development studio.

“People who fund work are often risk averse, and if they have to choose between a team that has done it before and someone who is trying to do it alone for the first time, they can see why some people choose the previous developer over it. track, ”he said.

That’s exactly what Sony did. Mumbauer’s project, codenamed T1X, was approved on a trial basis, but Sony kept the team’s existence secret and refused to offer them a budget to hire more people, prompting many to wonder if his company really committed to letting the team build a new studio. However, the small team continued to work and, by the spring of 2019, had completed a section of the game designed to show how the rest would look and feel.

At the time, Sony was going through a mix of management and the new boss was not impressed. Hermen Hulst, the former head of Guerrilla Games, was named head of PlayStation’s Worldwide Studios in November 2019. He found the remake project too expensive, according to people familiar with the issue, and asked why the planned budget for T1X was too much. so much bigger than remakes made by Sony in the past. The reason was that it was on a new graphics engine for the PlayStation 5. Mumbauer had to hire more people to help restore graphics to the new technology, as well as redesign the game mechanics. Hulst was not convinced, people said.

Just as he was hoping to go into production on the remake of The Last of Us, Mumbauer’s team was called in to help when another big game fell behind. The launch of The Last of Us Part II was pushed until 2020 from 2019 and Naughty Dog needed the visual arts service group to polish it. Most of Mumbauer’s team, along with some of the approximately 200 employees of the visual arts services group, have been assigned to support Naughty Dog, slowing the progress of their game.

Then the roles were reversed. Sony has sent the news that after the completion of The Last of Us Part II, some people from Naughty Dog will help with T1X. Mumbauer’s team saw this as a short-lived autonomy that is stripped. Dozens of Naughty Dog employees joined the project, and some had actually worked on the original The Last of Us, giving them more weight in discussions about T1X’s direction. The game was moved under Naughty Dog’s budget, which gave Sony more freedom than Visual Arts Service Group. It soon became apparent that Naughty Dog was in charge, and the momentum returned to what they had been for the past decade and a half: Visual Arts Support Group helping a different team of developers than lead.

For Sony, the move made sense. Naughty Dog is “one of the key studios” for Sony’s ability to sell PlayStations, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Kanterman. “Sony’s competitive advantage has always been contained exclusively over Microsoft and several new games, and remakes of classic titles from such a well-known team can help support demand for the PS5.”

But those who wanted independence were disappointed. By the end of 2020, most of T1X’s top staff had left, including Mumbauer and the game director, David Hall. Today, the T1X project remains under development at Naughty Dog with assistance from Sony’s visual arts support group. The future of the rest of Mumbauer’s team, which has come to be jokingly referred to as Naughty Dog South, remains unclear.