Later yesterday, Hulst also appeared in a lengthy video interview with French YouTuber Julien Chièze. As we covered already, the chief of PlayStation Studios said single player PC ports of PlayStation exclusives will remain delayed by at least a year compared to the console debuts, while multiplayer games will likely launch simultaneously. But Hulst also touched upon the consolidation topic, one of the hottest within the gaming industry ever since the explosive beginning of 2022. The PlayStation Studios head reckons it wouldn’t be correct to say Sony is taking developers off the market, rather it is helping the growth of new studios. We have welcomed seven studios into PlayStation Studios over the last couple of years. I want to be very clear that this is not an arms race. We are always working with teams that have a strong creative vision that we feel fit PlayStation Studios culture like a glove, which they do. That’s really important to us. And also a lot of these teams we’re actually helping stem them up, so we recently acquired Haven and that’s our first studio in Quebec, first studio in Canada, founded by, amongst others, Jade Raymond. We were really impressed with their ambition level, with their creative vision, and I think bringing them in-house actually enables us to help create a studio, to help stand up a studio much faster and much more rigorously than keeping them external, so the idea that we’re taking teams off the market is not necessarily true. It’s sometimes quite the opposite that we’re helping come to life new studios that are going to deliver wonderful new experiences to the PlayStation community. It appears to be a clear jab at Microsoft’s acquisitions, especially as Sony has decried the possibility that games like Call of Duty become exclusive (even though Microsoft denied it multiple times). Out of the seven studios mentioned by Hulst, though, only Haven and perhaps Savage Game Studios fit that bill. Bluepoint Games, Firesprite, Housemarque, Nixxes Software, and Valkyrie Entertainment have a long history, and it’s hard to believe they were not taken off the market when they were absorbed into PlayStation Studios.
