PlayStation has officially welcomed Bluepoint Games to the PlayStation Studios stable of talent, announcing today that it had acquired the developer. The dominant feeling with this acquisition is simply that it’s about time. Bluepoint has been partnered with Sony on various projects for a while: The Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes, as well as the remasters of the first three Uncharted games for The Nathan Drake Collection.
Hermen Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios, said in the announcement post: “With each of its projects, Bluepoint has raised the bar on console-defining visuals and gameplay, and the studio’s vast expertise in world-building and character creation will be a huge plus for future PlayStation Studios properties.” Marco Thrush, Bluepoint’s president, said, “Becoming a part of PlayStation Studios, empowers our team to raise the quality bar even further and create even more impactful experiences for the PlayStation community.”
The rumor is that Sony actually acquired Bluepoint some time ago, or at least have been very confident of the acquisition for a while. Several months ago, Sony acquired Nixxes and Housemarque in fairly quick succession, and each new announcement had a similar banner image: The logo of the PlayStation Studios and the studio in question, and the background showing a lineup of characters created by the other studios in the PlayStation stable, with the new addition slotted in the middle. Housemarque’s acquisition saw Selene from Returnal in the banner image.
Shortly after these announcements, a third banner image was uploaded to and quickly deleted from the official PlayStation Twitter. It followed the same template as the other images, but it showed the Bluepoint logo and a Demon’s Souls character in the gallery backsplash. That image was never really acknowledged by Sony, but the popular rumor at the time was that PlayStation would soon announce this other acquisition. It took longer than we thought, but it’s finally here.