It’s been over three years since PlayStation’s Japan Studio was closed and reorganized, but one former PlayStation boss thinks that it “wasn’t necessarily a surprise,” despite being “sad” about it.
Japan Studio developed and contributed to loads of iconic PlayStation games in its time, from Ape Escape to Gravity Rush and Bloodborne. However, as IGN reports, in 2021 it was confirmed that Japan Studio would be “re-centered to Team Asobi” – the Astro’s Playroom team which most recently made Astro Bot. In an interview with IGN Japan at Gamescom Asia, Shawn Layden, who previously served as president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, as well as chairman of SIE Worldwide Studios before leaving the company in 2019, has weighed in on the matter.
“It’s tough when a studio hasn’t had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels,” Layden says. “You know, if you have a hit once it’s like a drug, man, you’re chasing the next one, right? And then if you don’t have that for a while, you forget what it felt like, and then you start to forget how to get there.”
He theorizes: “There were probably two roads. One was the road they took. The other road was a real tough-love program. And maybe that’s what the Team Asobi thing is.” Elaborating on this, he suggests that this path could be compared to “pruning a bonsai,” since “you get it back down to its nub and see if you can grow back out again.”
While it might initially sound odd to suggest that a lack of hits was a problem for Japan Studio given the games it worked on, it’s worth pointing out that it was doing a lot of support work in its last few years. That’s not the case for everything, of course, but looking through the studio’s credits, the likes of Ghost of Tsushima and the Shadow of the Colossus remake – two notable releases from 2018 onwards – fall into this category.
Layden thinks “you can see that problem across the Japanese market” with other “historically super talented teams that haven’t tasted success for a while and are still struggling to get back to it.” He points to Square Enix as a developer that – despite making a “good move” when “they abandoned their overseas developer/publisher ambitions” – still isn’t “out of the woods” yet.
Recent years have seen some brutal layoffs and studio closures throughout the games industry, in a trend that doesn’t seem to be stopping – Riot Games announced staff cuts just this month. Layden also recently spoke out about the lack of new AA games in the industry right now, warning that relying solely on blockbuster AAA titles going forward would be “a death sentence.”