PlayStation has shut down Bluepoint Games

[Dragon Lord]

PlayStation has shut down Bluepoint Games, the studio behind the remakes of both Shadow of the Colossus and Demon's Souls.

This comes from Bloomberg, which confirmed the news with PlayStation. Roughly 70 employees are going to be impacted by the closure when it officially occurs next month.
“Bluepoint Games is an incredibly talented team and their technical expertise has delivered exceptional experiences for the PlayStation community,” a PlayStation spokesperson told Bloomberg. “We thank them for their passion, creativity and craftmanship."

Read the full IGN article here



I... I don't even know what to say to this news. PlayStation has done a lot of dumb, head-scratching moves before, but this might be the biggest one yet. How do you acquire a company that is really good at their niche (making really good remakes) and then completely destroy them? Like, excuse my language for a second, but PlayStation, what the absolute FUCK?!?!

They make an amazing remake of Demon's Souls, leading you to acquire them, and instead of letting them make more amazing remakes of your games, LIKE BLOODBORNE, you instead doom them to making a live-service God of War game. Which ends up being cancelled like every other live service game you've tried and horribly failed to make, leaving them abandoned to take the brunt of the consequences of that cancellation, and then let them flounder for a year trying to get ideas pitched for projects, only to give them the biggest middle finger of all and shut them down?

Nope, couldn't just let them go back to doing what they were REALLY GOOD AT DOING. You had to punish them for failing to give you the money printing live service game that you've wasted billions of dollars trying to make over so many years, and now a really good game studio is gone because of the absolute incompetence running this shit show of a company.

Honestly at this point Sony (Japan) needs to bring PlayStation HQ back to Japan, because it's been nothing but an absolute dumpster fire since they let the California branch have control over PlayStation. As a PlayStation fan, this move really pisses me off and at this point I wouldn't care if PlayStation crashed and burned. Microsoft/Xbox has always been (deservedly so) clowned on for acquiring studios and then sucking the life out of them and killing them. Apparently PlayStation saw that and was like, "we can do that better than they can!" 

I'm mad. That quote from the PlayStation spokesperson makes me really mad. "We thank them for everything they've done for us, except for make us the next Fortnite, so they can go f**k themselves actually." There's been a lot of studio shut downs the past year or two and most of them have been absolutely deserved, but Bluepoint was one of the few that didn't deserve this. They were set up for failure and they were absolutely screwed by Jim Ryan's stupid obsession with making the next mega money milking live-service game.

I can't wait for PlayStation to acquire Fromsoft at this point and then shut them down when they don't deliver Fortnite Souls (PlayStation probably thinks they could just take Nightreign, make another one, but this time lock all content behind paywalls).

[Moonface]

The trend of chasing live-service games in the hopes of getting a cash cow out of it is one of the worst things I think the industry as a whole could have chosen to do. PlayStation have had plenty of failures with it, but there's probably just as many examples outside of PlayStation of companies chasing the trend. The Game Awards ended with a brand new studio pitching a live service game as their debut title in Highguard, and within two weeks of launching the entire development team was let go because the game can't make enough money to cover the cost of keeping that team. Live service games are the equivalent to going all in on a game of Poker as it is, but the genre is so saturated that now it's like going all in at a table filled with the best Poker players in the world hoping to get lucky and join their ranks. Any publisher trying to do that has been a stupid move for a long while now and PlayStation doing it across multiple studios at the same time was reckless from day one, especially when the bulk of their studios have zero experience with live service titles. Naughty Dog had a live service game for The Last of Us in the works for years yet they can't even manage to balance the multiplayer modes in their existing games; Uncharted 3 was utterly abysmal at being balanced for the multiple years I played of it and The Last of Us 1's Factions was better until DLC weapons were added which are overpowered to justify the money spent on them.

I don't know if Bluepoint were pitching game ideas because they wanted to make something original, or if it was because PlayStation wanted them to make something original, but if those pitches weren't working out then they should have had them work on another remaster/remake of something that would benefit greatly from it (Bloodborne, for example) to give them something to do and something they can generate money with to recoup any expenses on the live-service God of War game that didn't pan out (and I have no idea how it was ever going to pan out when it is not remotely suited to being live-service). As much as I dislike how quickly some PS3/PS4 games got remasters/remakes on their successive console, it was at least giving the benefit of letting developers learn the next console and generate revenue while working on a brand new title for that same console, so it isn't like PlayStation hasn't had their developers do something as a gap filler while their next project still needs time to cook.

It all just makes me think of this thread I made where I questioned how long AAA games can be sustainable when development costs keep going up and GaaS's being chased as a golden goose to try and cover said costs.