Sony acquires Returnal developer Housemarque
Housemarque is the newest addition to PlayStation Studios.
We’ve seen both Microsoft and Sony use their abundance of cash to scoop up game developers and add them to their first-party studios. That’s exactly what the latter did this morning, as Sony has announced its acquisition of Housemarque, the team behind Returnal. Housemarque will now operate under the PlayStation Studios banner.
Sony announced its acquisition of Housemarque in a post to the PlayStation Blog. Ilari Kuittinen, the Co-founder and Managing Director of Housemarque penned an open letter about joining PlayStation Studios.
Housemarque most recently released Returnal earlier this year as a PS5 exclusive. The developer was also behind Nex Machina and Resogun. As a part of the PlayStation Studios family, Housemarque will exclusively develop games for Sony’s line of consoles. We recently saw Sony acquire Insomniac Games, the developers behind Marvel’s Spider-Man and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.
Sony cites the success of Returnal as one of the driving forces behind the decision to acquire the studio. Returnal received solid feedback from fans and critics, getting high praises in our Shacknews review as well. For whatever’s next from Housemarque and PlayStation Studios, stay with us right here on Shacknews.
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replyDonovan Erskine posted a new article, Sony acquires Returnal developer Housemarque
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Sony has acquired Housemarque
https://twitter.com/IGN/status/1409818485287534592
Seems they also acquired Bluepoint but it's not confirmed yet. Their japanese Twitter account posted this but deleted it, or was it a mistake?
http://chattypics.com/files/shackbrowseUpload_8rpqfnytgj.jpg
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Nex Machina is the shit.
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This feels like them buying naughty dog. At some point you're like "they didn't already own them?"
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Exclusives are horrible, and acquisitions hurt gamers...right?
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That’s really not accurate. They spent their last 7-8 years trying to bring it in 2 multi platform projects that made a release, with one failing badly and one being fantastic but nobody bought it on any platform and a project that got frozen and will maybe never see the light of day, for just being on the wrong track conceptually.
They’re a good example of a company that can benefit from being completely inside the Sony production support network. They wouldn’t have been able to make the leap they did in Returnal without it and would’ve gone under otherwise.-
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They have had the appearance of being close to Sony, because their Sony exclusives were the only ones that had the combo of being publicly recognizable games that sold well, but the truth is they were completely multi-platform with PC-forward fundamentals for the past decade.
I still think Nex Machina is a classic, but it suffered from just not having the marketing budget in the sea of PC gaming, even though it had excellent reviews and an OG pedigree with Eugene Jarvis on the team.
I hope this Sony purchase maybe can give Jarvis a new home too, if he wants to be back in.-
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I guess companies, and maybe that's dev studio and/or smaller publisher(?) may need to rethinking marketing strategy these days. I mean, compare to what happened with Valheim, which blew up simply because some twitch streams played it and bang, 7M units sold in just a couple of month for an unfinished game. It's lightening in a bottle to be sure, but I think it also speaks that marketing has to change - and I also think it shows that we've given too much power to "influencers" in general. But, that's a topic for another thread.
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Oh it’s definitely on my mind right now in this other thread: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=40703073
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Is it "House Mark" or "House Mark-key"?
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Never heard of them.
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