In 2019, PlayStation bought Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games. It was the first time in nearly a decade that the company had acquired a game studio. Then, over the subsequent four years, PlayStation bought up 10 more studios as part of a massive acquisition spree. As of February 2026, following the recent shutdown of Bluepoint Games, it’s clear that this hasn’t worked out at all, as the company’s pivot to live-service flopped hard.
On February 19, Kotaku and Bloomberg reported that Sony was shutting down Bluepoint Games after buying the studio responsible for well-received remasters in 2021. The year before, it had shipped a massive Demon’s Souls remake as a launch title for the PS5. By 2026, the company had yet to ship anything else. At one point, Sony had it working on a God of War live-service title, but that got canned, and nothing the studio pitched got approved. So now Bluepoint is gone, and its 75 employees are out of work. And this isn’t a one-off situation. Sony has spent the past two years failing to do much with its large roster of studios.
Here’s every game studio Sony has bought since 2019 and what’s recently happened to it:
Insomniac Games – Acquired in 2019 – Hit with layoffs in February 2024. New game shipping this year, Wolverine.
Housemarque – Acquired in 2021 – New game, Saros, shipping this year on PS5.
Nixxes Software – Acquired in 2021 – Has been a very active support studio for Sony, working on Horizon, Helldivers 2, and more.
Firesprite – Acquired in 2021 – Layoffs in February 2024. Its last shipped game was Horizon Call of the Mountain for PSVR2 in 2023.
Fabrik Games – Acquired in 2021 – Part of Firesprite. Hasn’t shipped a game since 2017.
Bluepoint Games – Acquired in 2021 – Closed in February 2026. Its last shipped game was Demon’s Souls in 2020.
Valkyrie Entertainment – Acquired in 2021– Hasn’t shipped a game since 2015. Helped on Concord in 2024.
Haven Studios – Acquired in 2022 – Hasn’t shipped a game yet. Founded in 2021. Working on delayed live-service shooter Fairgames.
Bungie – Acquired in 2022 – Faced layoffs in 2024. After delay, has a new game out this year, Marathon.
Neon Koi – Acquired in 2022 – Founded in 2020. Never shipped a planned live-service mobile project. Closed in 2024.
Firewalk Studios – Acquired in 2023 – Launched Concord in 2024. The game flopped after two weeks. Studio closed in 2024.
While a few of the studios Sony gobbled up over the last decade have been successful, like Housemarque and Insomniac, the majority of them have produced few, if any, new games, and three of them, including Bluepoint, are no longer around after just a few years. And even when a new game is launched, it might just get shut down shortly after release, as was the case with 2024’s Concord.
When you lay it out like that, it becomes really obvious that PlayStation’s last few years have been a mess. It also helps explain why the PS5 era for Sony has been so bereft of new experiences. So many teams were told to pivot to live-service, only for that plan to blow up in Sony’s face, and now it’s having to deal with all of that and is doing so in the fashion you’d expect from a large multinational corporation: layoffs, cuts, closures, and shutdowns.
At this point, if I were working at one of the studios listed above and I wasn’t developing a Marvel game or Saros, I’d be very nervous about the future under PlayStation, a company that at one point in time seemed to have an endless sea of riches when it came to studios and franchises.
