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To the surprise of few people who have been following PlayStation Studios’ progress over the last year, Sony finally confirmed its acquisition of Bluepoint Games today. In an interview with IGN, Head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst stated this was unlikely to be the last studio to join them either, but developers will only be welcomed into the PlayStation Studios family if they share the same “quality-first mentality.”
Bluepoint Games is just the latest team to become part of PlayStation Studios. Within the past few months, Sony has added Housemarque, Nixxes Software, and Firesprite. The latter then announced it had acquired Fabrik Games to join its own team. Between the five studios, this has added approximately 500 personnel to the PlayStation Studios family according to Escapist’s The Joy of Gaming host Shinobi602. It has been Sony’s biggest year in terms of acquisitions and this doesn’t look to be stopping anytime soon. Hulst said:
We are open always to building new relationships or bringing people in-house, but only if we adhere to the quality-first mentality and the right kind of innovative content, new experiences, diverse experiences. Because all of these teams, they share a lot, but they’re also very different from one another, and that’s what I really like. And I think that’s what the PlayStation audience, the PlayStation fans, deserve, it’s that diverse slate of games coming out of PlayStation Studios.
He later elaborated on what he meant by the “quality-first mentality”:
The way we look at our group of studios, and we now have 16 internal teams as part of PlayStation Studios, is very much the way we look at our games. It needs to be right, it needs to fit what we’re about in qualitative terms, it’s got to be the right games. Same with the teams. The teams stay have to have a very collaborative mindset. They need to be quality-oriented. We’re not buying teams to just be bigger. We’re only buying teams because we feel that together, we’re going to make something that is going to be even better than if we did it separate from one another.
Hulst had already described PlayStation Studios as a “truly global” company with “uniquely different creators” and it seems like Bluepoint Games is adding to that ethos. With the studio now working on “original content,” we’ll just have to wait and see what comes from them next.