Sony has been acquiring studios to add to the PlayStation Studios umbrella throughout the past few months. In 2021 alone, it has acquired four developers. Housemarque, Firesprite, Nixxes Software, and Bluepoint Games have all been purchased by Sony this year and are now under the PlayStation Studios division at Sony. The plan for Sony is to increase the development output of PlayStation Studios.
The four new developers represent a big investment on Sony’s part. Hiroki Totoki, Chief Financial Officer, Director, and Vice President at Sony said that the company plans to “aggressively invest in our development capability going forward”. This is even after increasing the number of developers working under PlayStation Studios by 20% this year.
The announcement is a strong statement of intent for Sony in support of the PS5 and in bringing PlayStation exclusives to PC and mobile. With the additional development capacity, Sony will be able to create more new games for players. Sony’s latest acquisition, Bluepoint Games, is known for porting popular PlayStation franchises to new consoles. They most recently worked on bringing Demon’s Souls to PS5. It’s rumored that Bluepoint is working on bringing some of the most popular PlayStation games to PC. With Sony’s move in bringing PlayStation games to PC, the added firepower at PlayStation Studios could mean more than just exclusives for PS5 owners.
It’s too early to say how all of the additions to PlayStation Studios will be utilized, but if Sony is interested in acquiring more studios we should begin to see the fruits of these acquisitions over the next couple of years. With Microsoft also acquiring Bethesda this year, we could be in the midst of a development cold war between the two console giants. The era of the console exclusive could be making a strong comeback over this generation.