The rapid expansion of PlayStation Studios has been something to behold over recent years, beginning with the acquisition of Insomniac Games in August 2019, and continuing through the pandemic-afflicted 2020 and 2021, and culminating with their most recent purchase, mobile game developer Savage Game Studios in August of 2022. More are likely to come, but what has been lost in the buying sprees from PlayStation, Xbox, and event Chinese mega-corporation, Tencent, was the intention signaled by PlayStation during a May earnings call that they were making another enormous investment in their already established studios, and now it seems that PlayStation Studios Malaysia may be one of the biggest beneficiaries.
During that earnings call, Sony said
We plan to increase software development expenses aimed at strengthening first-party software at our existing studios by approximately ¥40 billion [$308 million]
Going forward we aim to grow the game business by strengthening our first-party software and deploying that software on multiple platforms.
Now we’re beginning to see the benefits of these investments with PlayStation Studios Malaysia’s recent enormous expansion into a brand new office space in Kuala Lumpur, and the revelation that they’re working on some tightly locked down PS5 exclusive games. The Malaysian team currently plays home to nearly 80 members of staff, and has lent their services to the development of games such as The Last Of Us: Part I, and MLB: The Show 22, but their influence is growing as we’ve learned from the studios’ boss Hasnul Hadi Samsudin.
Speaking at Level Up KL in Kuala Lumpur this week, Samsudin and Neil Ingram from PlayStation’s San Diego-based Visual Arts Service Group, addressed the impact of the Malaysia team on those aforementioned titles and the team’s expanded role going forward.
So far it’s a very small contribution. When we started, the team was very small. A lot of what we are doing is asset development for the games, especially for MLB. For The Last of Us Part I, there was this thing called Death Hints, which are tips that tell the player what to do in certain situations, and our animation team were supposed to be working on them but there was a lot to be done, so that came to us. But now we have a full-fledged art team, so we can do environment modeling, concept art, and we have a brilliant animation team that is working on some games that we can’t talk about right now.
Ingram also spoke about the Malaysian region and its viability saying “There’s nothing that can be done in our world of AAA games that can’t be done here in Malaysia, It’s not just a case of them being able to do the work efficiently, but also the local development community’s ambition to grow.” This perspective might be reflective of a broader PlayStation push into the region. Perhaps one day soon the PlayStation Studios Malaysia team will grow to be something more than just a supporting act.
