Former PlayStation Boss Shawn Layden: Japan Studio Closure ‘Wasn’t Necessarily a Surprise’

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William D’Angelo
, posted 45 minutes ago / 182 Views

Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden speaking with IGN Japan at Gamescom Asia discussed the closure of Sony’s Japan Studio. He said it was “sad,” but it wasn’t a surprise.

“That was sad,” said Layden. “It wasn’t necessarily a surprise. I love Allan [Becker, former head of Japan Studio], and he worked really hard, but there was so much legacy malaise. It’s tough when a studio hasn’t had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels.

“You know, if you have a hit once it’s it’s like a drug, man, you’re chasing the next one, right? And then if you don’t have that for a while, you forget what it felt like, and then you start to forget how to get there.

“There were probably two roads. One was the road they took. The other road was a real tough-love program. And maybe that’s what the Team Asobi thing is. It’s like pruning a bonsai, right? You get it back down to its nub and see if you can grow back out again.”

Japan Studio was reorganized in April 2021 and the majority of staff were let go, however, Team Asobi continued as its own studio, which has found success with the recently released Astro Bot.

“Sadly, I think you can see that problem across the Japanese market,” Layden continued. “Writ large, there’s a lot of legacy, historically super talented teams that haven’t tasted success for a while and are still struggling to get back to it.

“But, you know, Capcom is prosecuting that problem fairly directly. I think Sega finds itself in a pretty good place. Bandai Namco has got some refactoring to do. Koei Tecmo has its market, owns that market, and they seem happy with that…How many different versions of [Final Fantasy VII] have been made?! Square Enix. I think when they abandoned their overseas developer/publisher ambitions and brought it back to home truths, that was a good move for them, but it’ll still take a while for them to get out of the woods.”

Layden believes the trouble with Japanese development goes back to the PlayStation 3 generation as the technical jump caused some older studios to struggle.

“In the PlayStation 1 era, Takara Tomi was making money back then,” he said. “They basically took their experience in the arcade business and translated it to the home, right? That was the selling point. PlayStation 1, Ridge Racer in your house, Tekken in your house.

“But the way you develop an arcade experience is completely different from how you develop a console experience. Now, PlayStation 1, they just translated it, and that seemed to be enough, because it was novel.

“[But] that skill set and expertise didn’t really translate into the console experience. And then when you got to PS3, and you had the Cell processor, and how do you code for that? And it was no longer an upgraded arcade experience, it was a high-end PC experience you’re offering at home. And I think that’s where the disconnect came for a lot of Japanese developers. And Japanese developers have been struggling ever since to try to get back to the top of the top of Olympus.”


A life-long and avid gamer, William D’Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.



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