PlayStation: Sony Japan Studio’s closure was inevitable for this reason, according to this former boss

Gaming News PlayStation: Sony Japan Studio’s closure was inevitable for this reason, according to this former boss

Years without a hit

The Sony Japan Studio, which closed in 2021, worked for years on some of the biggest games in Playstation history before the studio’s final employees were distributed around Team Asobi, the creators of‘Astro Bot. However, according to Shawn Layden, former president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, the studio’s closure was “no surprise.” Recently interviewed by IGN

It was sad. That wasn’t necessarily surprising. (…) It’s hard when a studio hasn’t had a hit for a while, then they forget what it feels like. You know, once you have a hit, it’s like a drug, man, you chase the next one, right? And then when you don’t have that for a while, you forget how you felt and then you start to forget how you got there.

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A deadly desert crossing

For Shawn Layden, the dissolution of Japan Studio is therefore due to the developers’ difficulties in producing a success. If Team Saobi was acquired, remember that the remaining teams did mostly technical support work after the release of Knock II in 2017. And for the former president, this problem is broader and would affect a large part of Japanese studios. “I think this problem is visible throughout the Japanese market“he said.”Overall, there are a lot of historic, super-talented teams that haven’t had success in a while and are still struggling to get back there.“. Nevertheless, studios like Capcom would overcome this problem with more or less success.

Capcom is tackling this problem head-on. I think Sega is in a pretty good position. Bandai Namco has a lot to do. Koei Tecmo has its market, it owns it and they seem happy with it… How many different versions of FF7 were made?! SquareEnix. I think when they abandoned their overseas development/release ambitions and brought the game back into reality it was a good decision on their part, but it will still take a while for them to break the deadlock.

The problem of Japanese studios

Ultimately, Shawn Layden believes this problem arose during the PS3 era. According to him, the Japanese teams have so far been content to bring an arcade experience to home consoles. But the performance of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation has reshuffled the cards and requires completely different expertise.

They basically took their experience in the arcade industry home with them, right? That was the selling point. PlayStation 1, Ridge Racer at home, Tekken at home. But the way to develop an arcade experience is completely different than the way to develop a console experience. Well, the PlayStation 1, they just transposed it, and that seemed enough because it was something new.

These skills and expertise haven’t really translated to the console experience. And then when you got to the PS3 and had the Cell processor, how did you program that? And it was no longer an enhanced arcade experience, but a high-end PC experience delivered to you at home. And I think that’s the reason for the discrepancy among many Japanese developers. And since then, Japanese developers have been fighting to get back to the top of Olympus.