In the years that have followed Japan Studio’s 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–games that inarguably defined the early years of PlayStation–deserved to be shuttered?
Well, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s former president, thinks it’s just as “unbelievable” as the rest of us, but what’s truly unbelievable is his explanation for why Sony ultimately decided to close Japan Studio’s doors: it wasn’t capable of producing PlayStation 5 hardware sellers like “God of War and Uncharted.”
This news comes via GamesRadar, which recently translated Yoshida’s speech at the Computer Entertainment Developers Conference on July 22. During the conference, Yoshida revealed that fans constantly ask him about Sony’s justification for closing Japan Studio–and, by the sounds of things, he thinks it’s just as ridiculous as the rest of us.
“Players from around the world have said that it’s unbelievable that Sony would shut down Japan Studio,” stated Yoshida. “Japan Studio released loads of games, creative games, didn’t it? At that time I was saying something similar.”
Following its closure, Sony stated that Japan Studio had simply been “re-organized” and absorbed into Astro Bot’s developer, Team Asobi. In reality, however, sources stated to VGC that the “vast majority” of Japan Studio’s team had been let go prior to the merger, and several of its key creatives, including Demon’s Souls producer Teruyuki Toriyama and Gravity Rush director Keiichiro Toyama, parted ways with Team Japan months beforehand.
“At 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,” Yoshida continued. “But while they came up with a lot of creative ideas, the games they made weren’t 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’s difficult to scale up like that… As a company, PlayStation wanted to drive hardware sales with games like God of War and Uncharted, because that’s the kind of game that’s in demand… It’s hard for Japan Studio to launch a new series on console.”
Sadly, that sounds about right for Sony, which has pivoted to releasing several live-service games that nobody wants to play since shutting Japan Studio’s doors in 2021. And, considering we haven’t had a new Uncharted game since Japan Studio closed either, the explanation comes across as even more baffling–although that might have something to do with the fact that Sony had Naughty Dog working on The Last of Us Online for several years.
These system sellers that Sony seems obsessed with focusing on 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’ll 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.