<\/p>\n
In 2019, PlayStation bought Spider-Man<\/em> 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\u2019s clear that this hasn\u2019t worked out at all, as the company\u2019s pivot to live-service flopped hard.<\/p>\n On February 19, Kotaku<\/em> and Bloomberg<\/em> 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\u2019s Souls<\/em> 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 Wa<\/em>r 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\u2019t a one-off situation. Sony has spent the past two years failing to do much with its large roster of studios.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s every game studio Sony has bought since 2019 and what\u2019s recently happened to it:<\/p>\n Insomniac Games \u2013 <\/strong>Acquired in 2019<\/em> \u2013 Hit with layoffs in February 2024. New game shipping this year, Wolverine<\/em>.<\/p>\n Housemarque \u2013<\/strong> Acquired in 2021<\/em> \u2013 New game, Saros<\/em>, shipping this year on PS5.<\/p>\n Nixxes Software \u2013 <\/strong>Acquired in 2021<\/em> \u2013 Has been a very active support studio for Sony, working on Horizon, Helldivers 2,<\/em> and more.<\/p>\n Firesprite<\/strong> \u2013 Acquired in 2021<\/em> \u2013 Layoffs in February 2024. Its last shipped game was Horizon Call of the Mountain<\/em> for PSVR2 in 2023.<\/p>\n Fabrik Games<\/strong> \u2013 Acquired in 2021 <\/em>\u2013 Part of Firesprite. Hasn\u2019t shipped a game since 2017.<\/p>\n Bluepoint Games \u2013<\/strong> Acquired in 2021<\/em> \u2013 Closed in February 2026.<\/strong> Its last shipped game was Demon\u2019s Souls<\/em> in 2020.<\/p>\n Valkyrie Entertainment<\/strong> \u2013 Acquired in 2021<\/em>\u2013 Hasn\u2019t shipped a game since 2015. Helped on Concord<\/em> in 2024.<\/p>\n Haven Studios <\/strong>\u2013 Acquired in 2022 <\/em>\u2013 Hasn\u2019t shipped a game yet. Founded in 2021. Working on delayed live-service shooter Fairgames<\/em>.<\/p>\n Bungie<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Acquired in 2022<\/em> \u2013 Faced layoffs in 2024. After delay, has a new game out this year, Marathon.<\/em><\/p>\n Neon Koi\u00a0<\/strong> \u2013 Acquired in 2022<\/em> \u2013 Founded in 2020. Never shipped a planned live-service mobile project. Closed in 2024.<\/strong><\/p>\n Firewalk Studios<\/strong> \u2013 Acquired in 2023 \u2013 <\/em>Launched Concord<\/em> in 2024. The game flopped after two weeks. Studio closed in 2024.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s Concord<\/em>.<\/p>\n When you lay it out like that, it becomes really obvious that PlayStation\u2019s 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\u2019s face, and now it\u2019s having to deal with all of that and is doing so in the fashion you\u2019d expect from a large multinational corporation: layoffs, cuts, closures, and shutdowns.<\/p>\n At this point, if I were working at one of the studios listed above and I wasn\u2019t developing a Marvel game or Saros<\/em>, I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4866,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[4645,4647,4644,4590,4646,1212],"class_list":{"0":"post-4865","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-releases","8":"tag-acquisition","9":"tag-disaster","10":"tag-ps5era","11":"tag-sonys","12":"tag-spree","13":"tag-studio"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}