Sony’s obsession with blockbusters is causing unrest within PlayStation Empire

Photographer: Roy Liu / Bloomberg

Sony Corp.’s Visual Arts Service Group has long been the unsung hero of many popular PlayStation video games. The San Diego-based operation helps complete games designed in other Sony studios with animation, art or other content and development. But about three years ago, a handful of influential figures within the Visual Arts Service Group decided they wanted more creative control and lead the direction of the game rather than being supporting actors in popular titles like Spider-Man and Uncharted.

Michael Mumbauer, who founded the Visual Arts Service Group in 2007, recruited a group of about 30 developers, internally and from neighboring game studios, to form a new development unit within Sony. The idea was to expand some of the company’s and team’s most successful franchises began work on a remake of the 2013 hit The Last of Us for the PlayStation 5. But Sony never fully acknowledged the team’s existence or provided them with the funding and support needed to succeed in the highly competitive video game market, according to those involved. The studio never even got its own name. Instead, Sony has transferred ownership of The Last of Us remake to its original creator, Naughty Dog, a Sony-owned studio behind many of the company’s best-selling games and a HBO television series in development.

Deflated, the small group’s leadership has largely been disbanded, according to interviews with eight people familiar with the operation. Many, including Mumbauer, have left the company completely. Mumbauer declined to comment, asking others not to be named about private information. A Sony representative declined to comment or give interviews.

The team’s failure highlights the complex hierarchy of video game development and, in particular, Sony’s conservative approach to game creation for the PlayStation 5. The Japanese conglomerate owns about a dozens of studios around the world as part of its PlayStation Studios label, but in recent years it has prioritized games created by its most successful developers. Studios like Santa Monica, California-based Naughty Dog and Amsterdam-based Guerrilla Games are spending tens of millions of dollars making games in the expectation that the investments will pay off exponentially. And they usually do. Hits including 2018’s God of War and The Last of Us Part II from 2020 is exclusive to PlayStation consoles, allowing Sony to sell a few 114 million from the PS4. Rival Microsoft Corp. has taken the opposite approach, relying on a wide variety of studios for its Netflix-like subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, which allows users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a variety of games.

Sony’s focus on exclusive blockbusters has come at the expense of niche teams and studios within the PlayStation organization, resulting in high sales and less choice for players. Last week, Sony reorganized a development office in Japan, resulting in massive departures of people working on lesser-known but acclaimed games such as Gravity Rush and Everybody’s Golf. The company has informed developers that it no longer wants to produce smaller games that are only successful in Japan. Bloomberg has reported.

This fixation on hit teams is causing turmoil in Sony’s portfolio of game studios. Oregon located Sony Bend, best known for the 2019 open-world action game Days Gone, tried unsuccessfully to pitch a sequel that year, according to people familiar with the proposal. While the first game had been profitable, development had taken a long time and critical reception was mixed, so a Days Gone 2 was not seen as a viable option.

Instead, a team in the studio was assigned to help Naughty Dog with a multiplayer game, while a second group was assigned to work on a new Uncharted game overseen by Naughty Dog. Some staff, including top leaders, were dissatisfied with this arrangement and left. The developers at Bend feared they might merge with Naughty Dog, and the studio management asked to be removed from the Uncharted project. They got their wish last month and are now working on a new game of their own.

Highlighting big hits can also be counterproductive, as games that start small can turn into huge successes at times. In 2020, Sony didn’t put much marketing power behind its quirky video game creation system Dreams, from PlayStation-owned Media Molecule in the UK. As a result, PlayStation may have missed its own version of Roblox, a similar video game tool. Parent company Roblox Corp. went public earlier this year and is now valued at $ 45 billion.

For their first solo project, Mumbauer and his team wanted to pitch something that would be well received by their bosses at Sony. Recognizing the risks and costs of developing a new game from scratch, they decided to focus on remaking older games for the new PlayStation 5. Remakes are considered a safe bet as it is cheaper to run an old one. game update and polish then to get you started. scratch, and they can be sold to nostalgic old fans as well as curious new ones. The team originally planned a remake of the former Uncharted game released by Naughty Dog in 2007. That idea quickly hissed because it would be expensive and require too much extra design work. Instead, the team opted for a remake of Naughty Dog’s melancholic zombie hit from 2013, The Last of Us.

At the time, Naughty Dog was in the middle of developing the sequel, The Last of Us Part II, which would introduce higher fidelity graphics and new gameplay features. If Mumbauer’s crew were to remake the first game with a similar look and feel, the two games could be packaged together for the PlayStation 5. In theory, this would be a less expensive proposition than remaking Uncharted, as The Last or Us more modern and shouldn’t require too many gameplay revisions. Once Mumbauer’s group settled, it could continue to recreate the first Uncharted game and other titles down the road.

But turning it from finishing other games to making your own is difficult, as original development teams “compete against hundreds of other teams from around the world, with varying levels of experience and success,” said Dave Lang, founder of Iron Galaxy Studios, which has served as a support team and development studio.

“The people who fund the work are often risk-averse, and when they have to choose between a team that has done it before and someone trying to do it alone for the first time, I understand why some people choose the previous developer. , ‘he said.

That’s exactly what Sony did. Mumbauer’s project, code-named T1X, was approved on probation, but Sony kept the team’s existence a secret and refused to give them a budget to hire more people, leaving many to question whether the company was really committed to rent out the team. build a new studio. Still, the small team continued to work, and by the spring of 2019 they had completed an area of ​​the game designed to showcase what the rest would look and feel like.

At that point, Sony went through a management shuffle and the new boss was unimpressed. Hermen Hulst, the former head of Guerrilla Games, was appointed head of PlayStation’s Worldwide Studios in November 2019. He thought the remake project was too expensive, according to people familiar with the case, and asked why the planned budget for T1X was so much higher. than remakes Sony had made in the past. The reason was that it was on a brand new graphics engine for the PlayStation 5. Mumbauer had to hire more people to rework the graphics on new technology and redesign the gameplay mechanics. Holly was not convinced, the people said.

Just as it was hoping to enter production of The Last of Us remake, Mumbauer’s team was enlisted to help when another major game fell behind. The Last of Us Part II release was shifted to 2020 from 2019, and Naughty Dog needed the Visual Arts Service Group to polish it up. Most of Mumbauer’s team, along with a few of the Visual Arts Service Group’s roughly 200 other employees, were assigned to support Naughty Dog, delaying the progress of his own game.

After that, the roles were reversed. Sony announced that after the completion of The Last of Us Part II, some Naughty Dog folks would help out with T1X. Mumbauer’s team saw this as taking away their short-lived autonomy. Dozens of Naughty Dog employees joined the project, and some had actually worked on the original The Last of Us, adding weight to discussions of T1X’s direction. The game was moved under Naughty Dog’s budget, which gave Sony more leeway than the Visual Arts Service Group. It soon became clear that Naughty Dog was in charge, and the momentum returned to what they had been for the past year and a half: the Visual Arts Support Group helped rather than lead another team of developers.

For Sony, the move made sense. Naughty Dog is “one of the most important studios” for Sony’s ability to sell PlayStations, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Kanterman. “Sony’s competitive advantage has always been exclusive content over Microsoft, and more new games and remakes of classic titles from such a legendary team can help support demand for PS5.”

But those who wanted independence were disappointed. By the end of 2020, most of the T1X team’s top personnel had left, including Mumbauer and the game’s director, David Hall. Today, the T1X project continues to be developed at Naughty Dog with the help of Sony’s Visual Arts Support Group. The future of the rest of Mumbauer’s team, who are jokingly called Naughty Dog South, remains unclear.