Remembering the Legacy of Defunct PlayStation Studios
Zipper Interactive
Starting with Zipper Interactive, which was founded in 1995 in Washington state, they first made a name for themselves working on various mech and airplane combat games on PC. However, they eventually became most known as the team behind the SOCOM franchise on PS2, which received critical and commercial success for many years. Because of this series and its exceptional usage of the PS2 network functionality, they were bought by Sony shortly before the PS3 was released in 2006. Unfortunately, the PS3 generation and basically their entire tenure as a first-party studio REALLY did not go well for them. Their first PS3 game was called MAG and it came out in 2010 and just had mediocre reception overall, but it was quickly followed by the LONG awaited SOCOM 4 in 2011, but that game came out the first week of the great PSN outage and was all but dead on arrival because of that. Lastly, they put out Unit 13 in 2012 on the Vita which was a perfectly serviceable Vita action game, but as we all know, the Vita was also not a great platform to release the hit game they desperately needed at that point. Sony shut them down the same month that Unit 13 was released. RIP Zipper and SOCOM
Evolution Studios
Moving on to my personal favourite in this video, Evolution Studios was a British studio founded in 1999 and they were always focused on developing racing games. Their debut game, "World Rally Championship," came out for PS2 in 2001 and was co-published by Sony. It was well-received and helped cement the company in the racing space as they continued to make yearly sequels until 2005. With the PS3 launching, they switched it up and created Motorstorm, which wasn’t actually a launch title but was definitely one of the more notable games around the system’s launch.
The following year, Sony finally purchased them outright for about 33 million USD. They continued the MotorStorm series throughout the PS3 generation, but they finally hit a bump in the road with the third entry in the series, Motorstorm Apocalypse. The game was originally scheduled to be released in March 2011, but at the last minute, it was delayed worldwide due to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011. The game contained many scenes of huge natural disasters and collapsing cities that would've been very insensitive or inappropriate to the market in the wake of the disaster. Evolution Studios had to backtrack on the whole game and make drastic changes to the game's content. A revised version of the game was eventually released in Europe and North America in March and May, respectively, but it was never actually released in Japan, as far as I could gather. To top it off, the game also took a huge blow in the places it did release, as Sony severely decreased the amount of marketing for the game, so as to avoid controversy or spend twice the budget because of these delays. Overall, it was just really unfortunate timing and the MotorStorm series was pretty much dead after that.
For the last time, Evolution switched gears and created Driveclub, which seemed like a strange decision that, on the outside, looked like direct competition for the very well-established Gran Turismo series. The game launched on PS4 in 2015 to a very rocky launch riddled with server issues and other technical problems. The game got a lot of negative press since it was very reliant on network connectivity, which sounds like a foreshadowing of GT7 to me. Despite their efforts to fix the game, the damage was done and Sony announced in March 2016 that it would be shutting down Evolution Studios. It’s reported that a lot of the team moved to work at Codemasters, and a lot of their DNA can be felt in OnRush, which came out in 2018.
Japan Studio
The last studio I wanted to touch on hasn’t necessarily shut down in the same way as the others but is definitely truncated to some degree. Japan Studio was the first first-party development team for PlayStation, founded in 1993, not long after the console division itself was formed inside Sony. Their first big hit was Jumping Flash back in 1995 but looking back, they’ve really been around for so long that they’ve developed a TON of games in a wide variety of genres and were even sizable enough to partition into various internal teams throughout the years. Some notable internal divisions included Team Ico, who made Shadow of the Colossus, Project Siren or Team Gravity who created the Gravity Rush games and of course, Team Asobi, who I will get into more later. Some of their other most highly acclaimed game series include Parappa the Rappa, Patapon, LocoRoco, and Ape Escape.
More recently, Team Asobi has been at the forefront of Japan Studio creating technical demos for various PlayStation hardware launches. On PS4, they released the PlayRoom to showcase the PS Camera, followed by Playroom VR and Astro Bot Rescue Mission to demonstrate the first PSVR headset. Rescue Mission in particular was widely praised for its innovative use of the PSVR platform and made AstroBot something of a new mascot for the brand. The next Asobi game called Astro’s Playroom launched pre-installed on the PS5 to showcase the new features of the DualSense controller, again to critical praise.
Unfortunately in 2021, it was announced that Japan Studio would be dissolving down to just Team Asobi after various directors of other internal teams seemed to be trickling away from the studio throughout 2020. There appear to be a number of reasons for this shift, the most significant of which is that PlayStation had been moving towards a more western focus in the late 2010s.As well, the studio is reported to have just gotten too unsustainable and inefficient with so many internal teams that were not producing games as successfully as the rest of the first-party catalog. When you look at the sales results for some of their higher profile games of the last few years, stuff like Last Guardian, Gravity Rush 2, and Knack 2, they just didn’t sell a lot of copies in the grand scheme of PS studios. Studio Japan was estimated to be 800 people in 2021, while Bluepoint, who did the Shadow of the Colossus remake, is supposedly about 70 people. Studio Japan’s Last Guardian took about 10 years to develop and it only marginally outsold Shadow of the Colossus remake, which only took 2-3 years to develop. Granted it is a remake of an old Japan studio game but these sales numbers are not very favorable to the huge team size of Japan Studio. Gravity Rush 2 and Knack 2 are both sequels and they sold much worse than Last Guardian. So it makes sense to me that Team Asobi is now estimated to be about the same size as Bluepoint after the restructuring. AstroBot and Team Asobi still have a lot of positive buzz and potential and the executives at PlayStation were able to pick up on this.
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https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-playstation-is-winding-down-sony-japan-studio
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-playstation-is-winding-down-sony-japan-studio/
https://www.sony.com/en_us/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-america-inc/2006/sony-computer-entertainment-acquires-zipper-interactive-developer-of-top-selling-socom-us-navy-seals-franchise.html
https://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2012/03/30/sony-closes-zipper-interactive.aspx
https://www.sony.com/en_us/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-america-inc/2007/sony-computer-entertainment-acquires-evolution-studios-and-bigbig-studios.html
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/motorstorm-apocalypse-european-release-delayed/1100-6303681/
https://www.cgmagonline.com/news/motorstorm-apocalypse-gets-another-release-date/
https://www.destructoid.com/disaster-motorstorm-apocalypse-canceled-in-japan-forever/
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/sources-playstation-is-winding-down-sony-japan-studio/
https://www.thegamer.com/playstation-studios-website-removed-japan-studio-replaced-team-asobi/
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/lse8s6/sources_playstation_is_winding_down_sony_japan/
https://kotaku.com/sony-shuts-down-driveclub-developer-evolution-studios-1766375507
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/sony-shuts-down-i-driveclub-i-developer-evolution-studios
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/sony-confirms-closure-of-evolution-studio
https://www.sony.com/content/sony/en/en_us/SCA/company-news/press-releases/sony-computer-entertainment-america-inc/2007/sony-computer-entertainment-acquires-evolution-studios-and-bigbig-studios.html
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/18/22984770/gran-turismo-7-down-outage-back-online
https://racinggames.gg/gran-turismo/gran-turismo-7-monthly-updates-continue-to-disappoint/
https://www.carthrottle.com/news/driveclub-comes-under-tremendous-pressure-after-failed-launch