Shawn Layden was one of the most important people in the video game industry once. Making his way up the ladder at Sony Interactive Entertainment, he would go on to become PlayStation’s chairman, only to suddenly step down in 2019.
Layden claimed that he had retired due to exhaustion, but rumors continue to circulate that this was because of an internal power struggle. Layden is now a strategic advisor for TenCent, not a bad position, but definitely far from being a major mover and shaker in the business.
In a recent interview with IGN, Layden was asked once again about the closure of Japan Studio. This is Sony’s oldest and most illustrious game studio, with a gameography filled with cult classics and core franchises alike.
Unlike London Studio, Sony did not formally close Japan Studio, but it still happened. Between 2020 to 2021, multiple veteran developers did not renew their contracts and announced their departure. Eventually the remaining staff moved into Team Asobi, and brough under PlayStation Studios.
Layden shared new insight, talking about not only Japan Studio, but the Japanese game industry as a whole. As he pointed out, these developers struggled in the transition to the HD era with the entry of the PlayStation 3/ Xbox 360 generation.
First, Layden talked about the PlayStation 1. He pointed out that many developers simply had to bring over their arcade titles and ‘translate’ them to a home console. And the examples he cited here were Bandai Namco’s Tekken and Ridge Racer.
And then he said this:
“[But] that skill set and expertise didn’t really translate into the console experience. And then when you got to PS3, and you had the Cell processor, and how do you code for that?
And it was no longer an upgraded arcade experience, it was a high-end PC experience you’re offering at home. And I think that’s where the disconnect came for a lot of Japanese developers. And Japanese developers have been struggling ever since to try to get back to the top of the top of Olympus.”
In saying this, Layden is certainly dropping some criticism of Sony’s decision making at that time. Of course, many PlayStation fans have fond memories of the PlayStation 3. But if you really was a fan at that time, you lived through the early struggles of the console.
The Cell was a big problem for developers, and not the only one. Sony overpriced the console, faced a scandal over misleading marketing, and failed to deliver a consistent launch lineup. The truth is, a lot of fan memories for the console revolve around the latter half of its lifetime, years after Xbox 360 secured market dominance over them.
Layden pointed out that Japanese game companies like Capcom, Koei Tecmo, Sega, and others struggled very hard to adjust to the demands of the HD generation, and the specific issues of the PlayStation 3 complicated things further.
In his assessment, Capcom and Sega are in a good place now, Koei Tecmo has settled on their niche, and Bandai Namco and Square Enix are still struggling in many ways. If we went on about each of these studios it would take too long, but it’s easy to see how much more different all of them were after the 5th generation, between the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube.
Layden shares his saddest sentiments regarding Japan Studio itself, saying:
“That was sad. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise. I love Allan [Becker, former head of Japan Studio], and he worked really hard, but there was so much legacy malaise.
It’s tough when a studio hasn’t had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels. You know, if you have a hit once it’s 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.”
It’s important to recognize that Japan Studio isn’t quite a franchise studio in the same way Naughty Dog is with The Last of Us, or Santa Monica Studio is with God of War. While they had original titles like Ape Escape and Gravity Rush, they were also known to make wild experiments every now and then, like Ico, Fantavision, and Vib-Ribbon.
So that legacy isn’t tied to one particular franchise, as much as it is the totality of their reputation as experimental and technically proficient developers. By the time Sony quietly retired the studio, it had been years since they were in that position.
Maybe it really wasn’t reasonable to expect Japan Studio to have kept going forever. But fans would be right to recognize this as a moment when Sony decided to change in how they made games, not only in the industry side of things, but in terms of game philosophy.
But if nothing else, fans will still have those old games to play, and their memories.
