Having acquired the likes of Bungie, Housemarque, Bluepoint Games, and Firesprite (among others) in recent years, Sony has expanded its already impressive first party portfolio significantly, and the expectation is that the company is going to keep investing on that front for the foreseeable future. In fact, another acquisition may have already been made that is yet to be officially announced.
As spotted by Last Stand Media’s Colin Moriarty, new British studio Ballistic Moon is listed as being Sony-owned by PitchBook.com, which is a financial data and software company with offices around the world. The studio’s page on the PitchBook website mentions its status as “acquired/merged”, with Sony listed as its parent company.
Interestingly, there have also been indications from Sony itself that have suggested that Ballistic Moon may indeed have been brought into the PlayStation Studios umbrella. The company recently posted a job ad for the position of a Senior Dialogue Designer at PlayStation, mentioning that the applicant would be working with a number of first party Sony studios, with Ballistic Moon being listed among several others.
The job ad has since been updated to remove mention of the studio, but you can check out a pre-edited version through here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.
Ballistic Moon was established in 2019, and is comprised of former staff from a number of major studios, including the likes of Supermassive Games, Quantic Dream, Guerrilla, Square Enix, and more. Reports have suggested that the studio is working on PlayStation-exclusive title codenamed Project Bates, which will allegedly be a survival horror game built on Guerrilla’s Decima Engine.