In the years that have followed Japan Studio\u2019s closure in April 2021, many have wondered exactly how Sony could have ever justified shutting down the once-beloved studio. Were sales truly so bad that the team behind Ape Escape, Shadow of the Colossus, and Ico\u2014games that inarguably defined the early years of PlayStation\u2014deserved to be shuttered?<\/p>\n
Well, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Interactive Entertainment\u2019s former president, thinks it\u2019s just as \u201cunbelievable\u201d as the rest of us do, but what\u2019s truly unbelievable is his explanation for why Sony ultimately decided to close Japan Studio\u2019s doors: it wasn\u2019t capable of producing PlayStation 5 hardware sellers like \u201cGod of War and Uncharted.\u201d<\/p>\n
This news comes via GamesRadar<\/a>, which recently translated Yoshida\u2019s speech at the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference on July 22. During the conference, Yoshida revealed that fans constantly ask him about Sony\u2019s justification for closing Japan Studio\u2014and, by the sound of things, he thinks it\u2019s just as ridiculous as we do.<\/p>\n \u201cPlayers from around the world have said that it\u2019s unbelievable that Sony would shut down Japan Studio,\u201d stated Yoshida. \u201cJapan Studio released loads of games, creative games, didn\u2019t it? At that time I was saying something similar.\u201d<\/p>\n Following its closure, Sony stated that Japan Studio had simply been \u201cre-organized\u201d<\/a> and absorbed into Astro Bot\u2019s developer, Team Asobi. In reality, however, sources stated to VGC<\/a> that the \u201cvast majority\u201d of Japan Studio\u2019s team had been let go prior to the merger, and several of its key creatives, including Demon\u2019s Souls producer Teruyuki Toriyama and Gravity Rush director Keiichiro Toyama, parted ways with Team Japan months beforehand.<\/p>\n \u201cAt that time, as the head of development, I was worried about [Keiichiro] Toyama [creator of Silent Hill] and the other Japanese developers at Japan Studio,\u201d Yoshida continued. \u201cBut while they came up with a lot of creative ideas, the games they made weren\u2019t big in scale. What we call AA games are a perfect fit for the PlayStation Vita, but we were slowly shifting to AAA on the PS4 and PS5, and sometimes it\u2019s difficult to scale up like that\u2026 As a company, PlayStation wanted to drive hardware sales with games like God of War and Uncharted, because that\u2019s the kind of game that\u2019s in demand\u2026 It\u2019s hard for Japan Studio to launch a new series on console.\u201d<\/p>\n Sadly, that sounds about right for Sony, which has pivoted to releasing several live-service games<\/a> that nobody wants to play since shutting Japan Studio\u2019s doors in 2021. And considering we haven\u2019t had a new Uncharted game since Japan Studio closed either, the explanation comes across as even more baffling\u2014although that might have something to do with the fact that Sony had Naughty Dog working on The Last of Us Online for several years<\/a>.<\/p>\n These system sellers that Sony seems obsessed with come out at such a slow rate, yet those who already own said systems would have probably enjoyed some smaller, AA-budget games to play in the meantime. I\u2019ll be curious to see if Sony continues to focus on this hardware-sellers strategy when the PlayStation 6, a console that nobody will probably be able to afford anyway, launches in the near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the years that have followed Japan Studio\u2019s closure in April 2021, many have wondered exactly how Sony…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[2211,2877,259447,1014,74],"class_list":["post-789393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-playstation","tag-playstation-5","tag-shuhei-yoshida","tag-sony","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}