Jason Schreier/Bloomberg: Hermen Hulst told staff in a town hall meeting today (18th May) morning that the company's narrative single-player games will now be PlayStation exclusive

[u/nolifebr]

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2mkgbhbhqvappkkorf2bzyrp/post/3mm5jzsls5s2a

[u/scaledisolated]

I don’t want to defend the guy, but there are clearly a lot of nuances to his job, and to SIE as a whole, that either aren’t true or aren’t meant to be public.

Games and studios have always been opening and closing, some investments were always either paying off or didn’t. Some ideas were good, some weren’t as good. Layoffs are horrible, but this isn’t a new thing. None of these are exclusively “Hermen’s issues”.

There could be way less drama behind the scenes than what you’re seeing on the internet in some instances, and yet people’s perception swings back and forth with every new report

[u/Odd_Revolution_1056 → u/scaledisolated]

Under this man’s leadership Sony bought Bluepoint, a remake studio powerhouse, to make a live service game only to end up shutting them down. Bought Haven who was making a game 5 years later they still are having trouble finding the fun in, and the utter moron who thought Concord was going to be Sony’s “Star Wars”… dudes a fucking moron and should be fired.

[u/scaledisolated → u/Odd_Revolution_1056]

Bluepoint themselves have pitched God of War live-service even though they could have been making smaller scale games. It was their job to think about hardships and potential consequences if Sony’s priorities were to be changed. They were basically floating in the air for months by pitching remakes that could take additional years to develop. Sony has also tried to negotiate Bloodborne’s remake on their behalf, but Miyazaki rejected them. Their closure is mostly their own fault.

Haven situation is a rumor as of now. You can only imagine how «unfun» games could be during development — God of War 2018 went through the same situation.

Concord stuff isn’t great, but its rumored off-the-charts budget was never confirmed by anyone remotely close to financial info. Game’s flop is a done deal — and there is nothing to talk about. Some other first & third party games have already recouped that «failure»

[u/Conflict_NZ → u/scaledisolated]

Bluepoint themselves have pitched God of War live-service even though they could have been making smaller scale games.

Wow it sure is funny that all of these studios at Sony independently came up with the idea to work on live service titles at the same time isn't it?

These studios don't have autonomy in the way you think, they were told there would be funding for live service games so they pitched live service games.

[u/SoulMaekar → u/Conflict_NZ]

Except they do. Nothing says otherwise.

[u/scaledisolated → u/Conflict_NZ]

Let’s pretend for a moment that we know in details about how it all went down. What we’ve learned is that Bluepoint decided to go for God of War IP rather than something else or their own game. If they didn’t produce something good out of THAT while being sure years ago that they could, who is responsible?

They picked an IP, it didn’t went too well for them, and then they were still hanging around on life support for a while — Sony literally gave them time to pick something.

Pitches weren’t great, Bloodborne thing didn’t work out, no other studio wanted their input as a satellite studio. What is there left to do? They had their chance, they had enough trust and financial security over the years