The news around Sony’s collaborating studio in Japan is of increasing concern to fans. This is the fourth relevant employee to leave the studio who worked on sagas like Bloodborne, Demon’s Would or Gravity Rush. In this case, we are talking about a producer who worked with From Software to publish Bloodborne exclusively on PS4.
Last December another producer of the game, Teruyuki Torayama, announced his departure from the study and coincidentally with the same type of announcement through Twitter. Both leave the studio they have been in the longest and announced that they will continue their careers in other companies, so the fact that they are going to retire from the industry is out of the question.
Veterans outings
As if that were not enough, one of the people in charge of Silent Hill, Keiichiro Toyama, also left the studio last month of to found his own, Boken Game Studio. He also took Kazunobu Sato who worked at The Last Guardian with him. To all this it is necessary to take into account that these news arrive since they were relevant characters for important titles, but there could well be more resignations less well-known.
I will be leaving SIE JAPAN Studio at the end of February. Thanks for everything so far. I will do my best to make games in the next place.
I’m leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment at the end of this month. I’m going to continue working hard on creating games. Many thanks to everyone! pic.twitter.com/WPpiLpCtoY— Masaaki Yamagiwa (@giwamasa) February 25, 2021
In any case, from the outside it looks like an escape due to a change of direction in the studio. Sony has been receiving criticism lately for how little support it has given its Japanese games, especially considering its roots. Jim Ryan spoke about this in his recent interview with GQ and stated that they want to strengthen their ties with Japanese studios.
It should be noted that Sony Japan Studio tends to collaborate with other studios rather than create their own for a while, the last one was Astro’s Play Room, as well as other Astro minigames. Before this we have Gravity Rush 2 from 2017, Knack II and LocoRoco 2 Remastered.
It is unknown what the future of the studio will be, its games are certainly not the best in sales, but they do tend to become cult. These developer outings are not looking good, but we will have to wait to find out where the story ends.
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