When Sony released its latest version of Astro Bot last year it allowed gamers playing as the cute white robot to unlock bots in various guises, from the fungus-infected zombie in The Last of Us to the knife-wielding mercenary seen in Metal Gear Solid.
The merging of characters — intended to celebrate the 30-year history of the PlayStation console — is symbolic of an accelerating multibillion-dollar effort to squeeze more out of the Japanese tech giant’s vast gaming empire.
According to interviews with more than 10 of Sony’s top games executives, designers and studio founders, the company is trying to balance creation and control in a business that is central to the Tokyo-based group’s strategy.
Sony is seeking to ensure that its “first-party studios” — 20 standalone groups that make games exclusively for its PlayStation console — contribute more to overall revenue growth and take measured risks, all without squashing the independence each studio demands to produce hits.
“I don’t want teams to always play it safe, but I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply,” said Hermen Hulst, chief executive of the studio business at Sony Interactive Entertainment, which handles the PlayStation brand.
Sony has spent big on its network of first-party studios over the past decade, such as its $3.6bn deal to acquire Halo-maker Bungie in 2022, while providing studios with hundreds of millions of dollars per year to develop wildly successful titles such as God of War and Spider-Man.
First-party studios brought in a small slice of Sony’s gaming and network revenues worth $32bn last year but executives said they carry outsized importance as they define the unique personality of the PlayStation. They provide the games and characters that mark the console out from Microsoft’s Xbox and Nintendo’s Switch.
“PlayStation is basically the HBO of gaming, mass budget and big productions,” said Joost van Dreunen, games analyst and academic.
Hulst said he wants Sony’s studios to “think big” in the search for new blockbusters. But he adds that the company is putting in more safeguards to limit the impact of inevitable failures.
That effort has been magnified by the collapse of Concord, developed by Firewalk Studios, which Sony acquired in 2023.
The title was Sony’s effort to catch up in so-called “live-service gaming”, a lucrative niche led by rivals such as Epic Games’ Fortnite and Electronic Arts’ Apex Legends, in which users pay to get access to continuous updates and features.
When Concord was released in September last year, the market was already saturated by similar and cheaper offerings. The game was shut down after only two weeks following poor sales and reviews. Firewalk Studios was closed soon after. Analysts suggest Concord cost upwards of $250mn to make.
That expensive demise appears to have led to a change in strategy. Hulst downplayed a previous target — pushed by former PlayStation boss Jim Ryan — of releasing 10 or more live-services games by March of next year. Sony cancelled plans for some high-profile live-service attempts, such as The Last of Us.
“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,” said Hulst. “The advantage of every failure . . . is that people now understand how necessary that [oversight] is.”
Studio bosses said this oversight includes more focus on group testing, encouragement to learn from what others in the Sony family are doing, and closer relationships between top executives who clock hundreds of hours of gameplay ahead of titles going live.
“The ways in which [a studio is] different might not all be helping you make great games,” said Chris Zimmerman, co-founder of Seattle-based Sucker Punch, the studio behind the Ghost of Yotei.
As a so-called “Triple-A game” — meaning it was significantly more expensive to produce than Astro Bot — Yotei is the follow up to a samurai game that became one of Sony’s best selling titles in Japan.
There were no “boundaries” enacted by Sony on how they developed the sequel, but “if we’re heading towards a giant landmine, like there’s another studio making exactly the same game, that’s good information,” said Jason Connell, Sucker Punch’s art director.
“That Concord has forced them to learn their lessons is the silver lining,” said Robin Zhu, an analyst at Bernstein. “Sony is in a great position to capitalise long-term if they focus on the kind of games that make them different and successful.”
Hulst said he wants studios — incentivised by profit sharing — to also think about how the intellectual property they generate can be turned into ever bigger franchises, core to Sony’s shift to an entertainment-led company. This has been achieved previously with titles such as The Last of Us, Uncharted and a vast array of anime that Sony has acquired.
The emergence of Astro Bot, made by Tokyo-based Team Asobi, has even led to a growing belief that it could be Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s decades-old Super Mario franchise, which features a moustachioed plumber who has leapt across multiple titles and even inspired Hollywood movies.
“We take a very intentional approach to IP creation . . . understanding how a new concept can turn into an iconic franchise for PlayStation, that can then again become a franchise for people beyond gaming,” said Hulst.
Sony’s pitch to studios is that it will insulate them from the financial pressure faced by independents by providing the resources to build bigger operations.
“It was a little bit scary . . . being bought by a bigger company feels like you’re just about to be swallowed by this bigger fish, but it was more like we get to still function like a small studio, but with access to the resources,” said Mikael Haveri, brand director at Housemarque, another Sony studio in Finland. It is gearing up to release Saros, the follow-up to a game that saw players reborn over and over again in an alien world.
But industry insiders note that these studios remain dependent on the parent group’s decisions around hardware, especially in the face of Nintendo’s success with the hybrid Switch, and are exposed to shareholder demands for continued revenue growth. Sony has recently said it will increase the price of the PlayStation in the US by roughly $50 due to the “challenging economic environment”.
This has led to fears that pressure on studios such as Team Asobi could lose what brought them success in the first place: a tightly knit 60-strong team able to work rapidly. “I think that intimacy is really hard to replicate if you would grow to like 200, 350 people,” said Asobi’s art director Sebastian Brueckner.
The issue creates a dilemma for Astro Bot’s makers and Sony’s other studios: how to be aligned with the Japanese group’s wider ambitions, while keeping its own distinct identity intact. So far, both Sony and the studios are determined to maintain that balance.
“If the creative side started feeling ostracised or penalised . . . between us we’d have that conversation” said Team Asobi head Nicolas Doucet. “That would definitely come to a boil.”