Irony is something that is not lost on many in the gaming space. There are plenty of cases of irony involving video games that “should’ve done well but didn’t,” or “weren’t expected to do this well, but did,” or companies making “critical choices” that would come to affect the gaming space for decades to come, and so on. The latest case of this was revealed by Sony, regarding FromSoftware. While the team wasn’t the “biggest thing around” in its early days, it’s now become one of the definitive upper-echelon developers that everyone knows will make quality titles no matter what, even if Sony isn’t exactly on board with what they are making.
That comes not from us but former SIE President Shuhei Yoshida, who noted on the Sacred Symbols Podcast that Sony was initially meant to be the publisher of what would become Dark Souls. However, FromSoftware denied this for a basic reason: Sony had basically stiffed them during the release of Demon Souls. That was the title that helped spark the “git gud” style of gameplay, but in Sony’s eyes, it was too difficult. So, despite promising the developer to help localize it worldwide, they backed out. Atlus and Bandai Namco picked up the slack and helped it get to other continents, and the developer never forgot that:
“FromSoftware was already working on the sequel, but they were so disappointed with how PlayStation treated them, we wanted to work with them again but they passed on it.”
The irony of this is clear for all to see. First, the Dark Souls trilogy was a huge hit and helped set gamers on a new path via the Soulslike genre that would be birthed from it. Second, the developer would make various other games in this gameplay style that were also huge hits, not the least of which was Elden Ring, and Sony would only be the publisher for a few of them, mainly Bloodborne and the Demon Souls remake on PS5.
Yoshida noted that he was happen to get to work with the team again during that period and heaped all sorts of praise on the team. However, one can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if Sony hadn’t dropped the ball here. If they had become the “dedicated publisher” for the developer, many things could’ve been different, not to mention, Sony could’ve raked in a lot of money.
Then again, seeing how the dev team is thriving without them, it might be for the best that Sony isn’t interfering.
