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

Photographer: Roy Liu / Bloomberg

Sony Corp.’s Visual Arts Service Group has long been the unknown hero of many successful PlayStation video games. The San Diego-based operation helps finish games designed at other Sony studios with animation, art or other content and development. But about three years ago, a handful of influential figures from the Visual Arts Service group decided they wanted to have more creative control and direct the direction of the game instead of being supporting actors in popular titles such as Spider-Man and Uncharted.

Michael Mumbauer, who founded the Visual Arts Service Group in 2007, recruited a group of about 30 developers, both internally and from neighboring game studios, to form a new development unit within Sony. The idea was to expand some of the most successful franchises of the company and the team began work on a remake of the 2013 hit The Last of Us for PlayStation 5. But Sony never fully acknowledged the team’s existence or gave them the funding and support they needed to succeed in the highly competitive video game market, according to the people involved. The studio didn’t even get its own name. Instead, Sony moved ownership of the remake The Last of Us to its original creator, Naughty Dog, a Sony studio behind many of the company’s best-selling games and a HBO TV series in development.

Deflated, the small group’s leadership has largely dissolved, according to interviews with eight people familiar with the operation. Many, including Mumbauer, have left the company completely. Mumbauer declined to comment and others asked not to be called to discuss private information. A Sony representative declined to comment or offer interviews.

The team’s failure highlights the complex hierarchy of video game development and, in particular, Sony’s conservative approach to making games for PlayStation 5. The Japanese conglomerate has dozen studios around the world as part of its PlayStation Studios label, but in recent years it has prioritized games made by its most successful developers. Studios such as Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, based in California, and Guerrilla Games, based in Amsterdam, spend tens of millions of dollars to make games in the hope that investments will pay off exponentially. And they usually do. Achievements including God of War and 2018 The Last of Us Part II of 2020 is exclusive to PlayStation consoles, helping Sony sell some of them 114 million from the PS4. Rival Microsoft Corp. has taken the opposite approach, relying on a wide range of studios to power its subscription service similar to Netflix, Xbox Game Pass, which allows users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to various games.

Sony’s focus on exclusive blockbusters has come at the expense of the PlayStation organization’s niche teams and studios, which has resulted in high turnover and fewer options for gamers. Last week, Sony reorganized a development office in Japan, which led to the mass departure of people working on lesser-known but acclaimed games like 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 reported.

This fixation on successful gaming teams is creating unease in Sony’s gaming studio portfolio. Based in Oregon Sony Bend, best known for the 2019 Days Gone open world action game, tried unsuccessfully to present a sequel that year, according to people familiar with the proposal. Although the first game had been profitable, its development had been long and critical reception was mixed, so a Days Gone 2 was not seen as a viable option.

Instead, one studio team was assigned to help Naughty Dog with a multiplayer game, while a second group was assigned to work on a new Uncharted game under the supervision of Naughty Dog. Some staff members, including the main ones in charge, were not satisfied with this agreement and left. Bend’s developers feared they might be absorbed by Naughty Dog and the studio’s leaders called for the Uncharted project to be withdrawn. Last month they got their wish and now they are working on a new game of their own.

Emphasizing big hits can also be counterproductive, as sometimes games that start small can turn into massive hits. In 2020, Sony didn’t put too much muscle behind the quirky video game creation system Dreams, from Media Molecule, owned by PlayStation, UK. As a result, PlayStation may have lost its own version of Roblox, a similar video game tool. The parent company Roblox Corp. went public earlier this year and is now valued at $ 45 billion.

For his first solo project, Mumbauer and his crew wanted to release something that was 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 old games for the new PlayStation 5. Remakes are considered a safe bet, as it is cheaper to update and polish a game. old than it is to start scratch, and can be sold to nostalgic old fans and curious. The team originally planned a new version of the first Uncharted game, released by Naughty Dog in 2007. This idea quickly faded because it would be expensive and require too much added design work. Instead, the team settled on a remake of Naughty Dog’s melancholy zombie hit in 2013, The Last of Us.

At the time, Naughty Dog was in the midst of developing the sequel, The Last of Us Part II, which would introduce more faithful graphics and new gameplay features. If Mumbauer’s crew remade the first game that looked similar, the two games could be packaged together for PlayStation 5. In theory, this would be a less expensive proposition than remaking Uncharted, as The Last of Us was more modern and it would not require too many game reviews. Then, once Mumbauer’s group was established, he could remake the first game of Uncharted and other titles.

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

“People who fund the work are usually at risk and, if they have to choose between a team that has done it before, and someone trying to do it on their own for the first time, I can see why there are those who choose the previous developer over the latter, ”he said.

This is what Sony did. Mumbauer’s project, codenamed T1X, was approved on a trial basis, but Sony kept the team’s existence a secret and refused to give them a budget to hire more people, which it did. that many wondered if the company was really committed to letting the team build a new studio. Still, the small team continued to work and, in the spring of 2019, had completed a section of the game designed to show how the rest would look and feel.

At the time, Sony was going through a management mix and the new boss wasn’t impressed. Hermen Hulst, former head of Guerrilla Games, was appointed head of the PlayStation World Studios in November 2019. He thought the remake project was too expensive, according to people who knew the subject, and asked why the planned budget for T1X it was much higher than the remakes Sony had done in the past. The reason was that it used a new graphics engine for PlayStation 5. Mumbauer needed to hire more people to help rework the graphics of new technologies and redesign the game mechanics. Hulst was not convinced, people said.

Just as he was hoping to go into production on the remake of The Last of Us, Mumbauer’s team received a call to help him when another great game was left behind. The release of The Last of Us Part II had been pushed until 2020 from 2019 and Naughty Dog needed the visual arts services group to finish polishing it. Most of Mumbauer’s team, along with some of the more than 200 staff members of the visual arts services group, were tasked with supporting Naughty Dog, slowing the progress of their own game.

Then the roles were reversed. Sony sent the news that after finishing The Last of Us Part II, some people from Naughty Dog would help with T1X. Mumbauer’s team saw this as their short-lived autonomy. Dozens of Naughty Dog staff joined the project and some had worked on the original The Last of Us, giving them more weight in discussions about T1X management. The game 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 at the forefront and the dynamic returned to what they had been for the past decade and a half: the Visual Arts Support Group helping another team of developers instead of leading.

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

But those who had wanted independence were disappointed. By the end of 2020, most of the T1X team’s senior staff had left, including Mumbauer and the game director, David Hall. Today, the T1X project continues in development at Naughty Dog with the assistance of Sony’s visual arts support group. The future of the rest of Mumbauer’s team, which has been jokingly referred to as Naughty Dog South, is still unclear.