Sony Acquires Returnal Studio Housemarque and Possibly Bluepoint Too

Sony announced this morning that it’d acquired another studio: Housemarque, the developers of Returnal. The studio has become part of PlayStation Studios, which makes it the first major acquisition since Sony bought Insomniac games two years ago. It’s also possible that it acquired Bluepoint Games, but we don’t know for sure — Sony may have revealed that purely by accident.

Sony revealed more details about the acquisition in an announcement post on the PlayStation blog. Housemarque has a pretty long history with Sony, as they’ll be happy to tell you. In the announcement, Ilari Kuittinen, Housemarque’s managing director, said the partnership has been “over 26 years in the making” and added: “Our strong partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment started with Super Stardust HD on PS3 and since then we have made arcade-inspired games for all of the PlayStation platforms.” While Housemarque has been developing games since the 90s, after this PS3-era collaboration, it’s worked on games almost exclusively for PlayStation platforms.

There’s potentially more good news, as Sony may have accidentally revealed itself: An image uploaded to the official PlayStation Twitter substituted the Housemarque logo for that of another studio: Bluepoint Games. Whether this is an accident or a preview of another acquisition that was due to be announced later, we don’t yet know. Sony hasn’t acknowledged it either way.

It would make sense for Sony to acquire Bluepoint, though. The studio has primarily worked on ports or remakes of Sony projects, including the remastering of the first three Uncharted games for the Nathan Drake Collection, the remake of Shadow of the Colossus, and, most recently, the remake of Demon’s Souls for PS5. The image for the Bluepoint acquisition, which has been deleted but was nabbed by other accounts, showed an image from Demon’s Souls next to Housemarque star Selene from Returnal.

Source: PlayStation Blog