Cognition Dissemination: A Requiem for Sony’s Japan Studio

Sony Computer/Interactive Entertainment’s Japan Studio has developed and assisted in funding a laundry list of titles for the PlayStation brand over the last 26 years. They, in doing so, established a ridiculous number of franchises, too many to remember directly from memory. But given the developments over the last console generation, like, well, the lack of Japan Studio-developed and published titles, the news of their essential demise isn’t much surprise. Yet it still blows.

It was confirmed by Sony to IGN last month that Japan Studio is undergoing a reorganization that will finish by April 1st, the beginning of the gaming industry’s new fiscal year. The studio will then focus around Asobi Studio, the team responsible for the Astrobot games. This makes sense considering their only release in recent memory was Astro’s Playroom, which comes as a pack-in bonus preinstalled on PlayStation 5 hard drives. This will amount to a massive size reduction for a company that once contained multiple teams and dedicated staffers capable of establishing partnerships with other Japanese studios for project developments, and it will take time for the gaming industry (including Sony themselves) and audience at large to realize how much is being lost here in the long term.

If you’re as old as me (pretty old!) and have been attuned to the PlayStation brand since shortly after its inception in the mid-to-late 90s, chances are you’ve known of or played at least a couple of Japan Studio-developed or funded games.

Many of Japan Studio’s best titles, to no surprise, released on the console Sony debuted with: The PSOne. They provided too many of them to list, among them Ape Escape and the Legend of Dragoon. But most of the best titles were collaborations with development partners, which included Gran Turismo (with Polyphony Digital), Jumping Flash (with Exact and Ultra), Wild Arms (with Media.Vision) PaRappa the Rapper (with NanaOn-Sha), and Hot Shots Golf (with Camelot, and subsequent titles from Clap Hanz). This continued on the PlayStation 2, with sequels to several aforementioned games and others like Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and the Dark Cloud games (developed by Level 5). Both platforms received over 100 titles either developed or published and funded by Japan Studio, their golden age.

It was during the PlayStation 3 era when trouble started brewing, with the number of titles they handled lowering in number, at least partially thanks to the increased work that accompanied adapting to HD console development. The constant delay of The Last Guardian was the biggest example, eventually pushed back to the succeeding PlayStation 4. They still released several experimental and interesting projects, like Puppeteer, Tokyo Jungle, Demon’s Souls (developed by FromSoftware) and Folklore (developed by Game Republic). This was even worse during the PS4’s lifeline, where Japan Studio only developed or published a little more than a handful of new titles.

To be fair, a good portion of their efforts were directed towards PSP and Vita game development, with games like Patapon and LocoRoco on the former system, and Soul Sacrifice and Gravity Rush on the latter. Many of these games were sadly neglected outside Japan, even when the PSP titles listed there were remastered for PS4.

In fact, there’s something else many of these games have in common: They weren’t the biggest sellers. Titles like the Gran Turismo games, some of the Hot Shots Golf titles, and Team Ico’s titles were the exceptions, while others veered between low and mid-tier efforts. Others weren’t localized at all, like the Boku no Natsuyasumi/My Summer Vacation games and the first Oreshika title.

Even if they weren’t multimillion AAA-level sellers, their games will still be missed in the future. They provided heaps of variety to the software ecosystems of previous PlayStation platforms, and could have added to the ecosystems of the PlayStation 5 and its eventual successors. When Japan Studio took chances on smaller and more experimental titles, it thus encouraged third-party developers and publishers to do the same on PS platforms. This is a good part of why PlayStation console platforms beyond the PS2 didn’t have anywhere near the amount of unique Japanese software. Sony Interactive Entertainment has made their plans to go big or go home with all their big-budget software from here on clear.

A small number of Japanese efforts will be kept around, like Gran Turismo with its incoming seventh installment for PlayStation 5. Other developers will have to go multiplatform, if they’ll exist at all. Fumito Ueda, director of the Team Ico titles, established his own small game idea creation studio called Gen Design while finishing development on The Last Guardian. They might have teased a new development project with their 2021 New Year’s card given its style, partial funding for which is being provided by Epic Games. Keiichiro Toyama and other former Japan Studio members who worked on the Siren and Gravity Rush titles recently established Bokeh Studio, and are working on some kind of horror game for multiple platforms. Hot Shots Golf series developer Clap Hanz recently trademarked “Clap Hanz Golf,” an indication that they’d like to make a similar series without the franchise name in the future. Lastly, the My Summer Vacation developers are working on a Crayon Shin-chan adaptation styled after those games.

But what about the rest? Members of other development teams have been scattered around to various development houses, or are making a living in other industries. We haven’t seen anything about successors for unique titles like Tokyo Jungle or Puppeteer from anyone, and it’s unlikely that we ever will.

Japan Studio will be dearly missed by anyone who enjoyed unique titles that only this development house wanted to take a chance on, and soon, perhaps Sony themselves will too. They might soon regret not having their own studio to add unique flavor to their console software lineups, especially with Microsoft recently expanding their Japanese development presence. Even if they do miss having that and attempt to establish a replacement, the robust studio of old is gone forever. The only thing left is cherishing what they left us, mourning what they could have given us, and hoping that now-independent studios that have emerged or will rise in the future can continue making worthwhile unique titles.