by
William of Angelo
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Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden speaks with IGN Japan at Gamescom Asia, they discussed the closure of Sony’s Japan Studio. He said it was “sad,” but not a surprise.

“It was sad,” said Layden. “It wasn’t necessarily a surprise. I love Allan (Becker, former head of Japan Studio), and he worked very hard, but there was so much inherited discomfort. It’s difficult when a studio doesn’t have haven’t had any success for a while, then they forget what it feels like.

“You know, if you take a dose once, it’s like a drug, man, you’re chasing the next one, right? And then if you don’t have it for a while, you forget about it. that you felt, and then you start to forget how to get there.

“There were probably two routes. One was the one they took. The other route was a real tough love program. And maybe that’s what the Team Asobi thing is. It’s like pruning a bonsai, isn’t it? You take it back to its original state and see if you can grow back.

Japan Studio was reorganized in April 2021 and the majority of staff were laid off. The Asobi team has remained its own studio, which has seen success with the recent launch Astrobot.

“Unfortunately, I think this problem is visible in the Japanese market,” Layden continued. “Overall, there are a lot of historically super talented legacy teams that haven’t had success in a while and are still struggling to get back to it.

“But, you know, Capcom is tackling this problem pretty directly. I think Sega is in a pretty good position. Bandai Namco has some refactoring to do. Koei Tecmo has their market, owns that market, and they seem happy of this….How many different versions of (Final Fantasy VII) were made?! SquareEnix. I think when they abandoned their overseas developer/publisher ambitions and brought them back to their domestic realities, it was a good decision for them, but it will still take them a while to come out of the woods.

Layden believes that the problems with Japanese development date back to the PlayStation 3 generation, as the technical leap caused difficulties for some older studios.

“Back in the PlayStation 1 days, Takara Tomi was making money at the time,” he said. “They basically took their experience in the arcade industry and brought it to the home, right? That was the selling point. PlayStation 1, Ridge Runner in your house, Tekken in your house.

“But the way you develop an arcade experience is completely different from the way you develop a console experience. Now, on PlayStation 1, they just translated it, and that seemed enough, because it was new.

“(But) that skill set and expertise didn’t really translate into the console experience. And then when you came to PS3, and you had the Cell processor, and how do you code for this? And it was no longer an enhanced arcade experience, it was a high-end PC experience that you deliver at home. And I think that’s where a lot of Japanese developers struggled. to return to the summit of Olympus.”

Passionate and long-time player, William of Angelo first discovered VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was recruited in 2010 as a junior analyst, then worked his way up to senior analyst in 2012 and took charge hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content himself YouTube channel And Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

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