In light of some of the troubles that PlayStation Studios have faced over the last year, the company seems to be looking to find a balance between offering its developers creative freedom and keeping business considerations in mind. In a report by the Financial Times, developers from various PlayStation Studios, including Astro Bot developer Team Asobi.
Astro Bot creative director Nicolas Doucet spoke in the interview about how the studio tries to strike a similar balance, and has not yet faced friction that one would expect from the creative aspects of game development with business decisions. He does note, however, that if it were to actually become an issue, a conversation would need to happen.
“If the creative side started feeling ostracised or penalised . . . between us we’d have that conversation” said Doucet (via Genki_JPN). “That would definitely come to a boil.”
Art director Sabastian Brueckner attributes the studio’s success within PlayStation’s ambitious plans as stemming from Team Asobi being a smaller studio with 60 employees. He spoke about how larger studios with 200 or 350 employees wouldn’t have the same level of intimacy between team members as smaller teams would have. “I think that intimacy is really hard to replicate if you would grow to like 200, 350 people,” he said.
PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst spoke about how the company wants to approach developing games moving forward, while keeping the same balance. “I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply,” he said.
These decisions come in light of Sony over the last year having cancelled several of its live service projects in the wake of Concord’s negative reception by critics and players alike. Addressing these cancellations, Hulst spoke about how PlayStation is now more focused on offering players diverse experiences.
“The number [of live-service releases] is not so important. What is important to me is having a diverse set of player experiences and a set of communities,” he said.
“We have since put in place much more rigorous and more frequent testing in very many different ways,” he continued. “The advantage of every failure… is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu also mentioned that Concord might have been one of the major releases that has forced Sony to learn from its mistakes. Zhu also notes that the company is poised for long-term success as long as it doesn’t stray from the kinds of games that made PlayStation popular to begin with.
“That Concord has forced them to learn their lessons is the silver lining,” said Zhu. “Sony is in a great position to capitalise long-term if they focus on the kind of games that make them different and successful.”
As for new projects in the future, Hulst spoke about how PlayStation’s approach to creating and developing new IP is “very intentional”, with the company taking time to understand “how a new concept can turn into an iconic franchise for PlayStsation, that can then again become a franchise for people beyond gaming.”
