Or it could be that some people don’t understand what he meant with his organic comments. The comments about organic growth were not said in contradiction to acquisitions themselves. He even mentions them acquiring Insomniac right after growing organically. May help reading the actual interview instead of second hand interpretation on some other site.
I’m not a Jim Ryan fan, I think most of his takes and policies are horrible. So I’m not blindly defending him. Just trying to bring back some of the nuance I think is missing.
I’m also not going to read the room and let that stop me from expressing my opinion because I may be in the minority. Different views and opinions is what can make some topics very interesting.
Edit: sorry meant to include the link to the original interview
Good fit for Sony’s 1P. Those teams could use more resources and since Sony had deals with them anyhow won’t affect much other than the games being better for their userbase. Good outcomes all around. Never been a fan of Housemarque games but Bluepoint has lots of room potentially to glow up into something special.
It isn’t deceptive, just hypocritical. They told us they were looking to buy studios. Everyone knows Jim Ryan is full of shit and he got called out for that already when saying they would buy teams. He was surprised by the Zenimax deal and so he got his foot stuck in mouth in responding to it in his PR statements. That doesn’t mean we need to beat that drum every single time PlayStation makes moves. Especially if it just overshadows legitimately good implications of the move for the devs and their fanbase.
Nick just updated the Playstation Studios thread, and he has added both Housemarque and Bluepoint.
It might be just me, but this is slightly expected - and frankly, boring. I would have assumed that they would be bought out anyway. Both are small studios and for Bluepoint, they would have not even crossed 80M USD.
(Btw, the US threshold to go to regulators in an M&A is 92 millioin USD. )
I get what they were going for, but posing the question of “Why did Playstation buy this developer?” seems like a pretty silly question. They wanted to.
That is a weirdly dismissive take on the article, lol. It’s so they can get more insight into the process and motivations specifically. I agree it is kinda boring to read tbh, but whatever. Better to have the info out for clarity’s sake anyhow. Woulda been cooler to do a roundtable type thing maybe at some point.
It woulda been a bigger deal than it appears to be now if they had a more celebratory nature to the announcement I think. It genuinely kinda feels like it isn’t being talked about a ton, which is somewhat surprising but also somewhat understandable since it didn’t come outta left field or anything.
Makes sense.
I wonder what sonys budget is for new aquisitions.
I also wonder how reactionary it is to Microsofts recent spending spree.
I think its around $1 billion. $400 mill to expand existing studios and the rest for aquisitions, they probably have enough for one more bluepoint calibre dev.
Nex Machina was awesome and better than Resogun in my opinion. I also loved Alienation and Matterfall was solid but not at the same level of their other games. Of course, I wasn’t a fan of Resogun because im not into the space ship shooters.
I haven’t played Returnal because of it being a rogue like game but my friend who except for Outland and Nex Machina, never really bothered with Housemarque and he’s thrilled with the acquisition and loved the game even though he’s not good enough to beat it. He’s looking forward to seeing what their next game is.
The acquisition will easily work out. Housemarque on a pure technical standpoint as well as gameplay, combat, etc. is excellent and if Sony expands them to hopefully a primary AAA team and a secondary AA team, they will become extremely efficient like Insomniac and release high quality games.
I don’t believe this move was reactionary at all because they were in discussions for over a year and anyone who watched last June’s State of Play and saw Herman Hulst introduce Housemarque and Returnal along with the PS Studios logo before it, you could see this coming from a mile away. Hell, im a nobody who said a year ago that Housemarque (and Bluepoint Games) would get acquired by Sony which was months before ZeniMax so again, this acquisition wasn’t reactionary.
Overpaying for Square Enix or another major publisher would be the reactionary move.
it was definitely reactionary to everyone EA, Embracer Group, EPIC, but mainly Microsoft and I think they are just getting started I don’t buy Hermen Hulst saying there now in Aquistions spree.
I dont think this acquisition is reactionary at all. Works for Housemarque that gets access to Sony resources and Sony can say “we have another studio”.
I don’t think Hulst said they were in acquisition spree, just that they are not following MS in a competition for acquisition and buying studios they are close to when they can.
That’s interesting. I thought Resogun easily eclipsed Alienation and Matterfall. Nex Machina isn’t close behind Resogun for me but second of that bunch.
Fair enough, I suppose. I bought and played some of Returnal. I don’t think it’s very good.
Housemarque’s style of game doesn’t sell well at the scale PlayStation demands. I also don’t think they can nail the PlayStation formula. If Bend with Days Gone couldn’t cut it, well the bar is pretty damn high internally over there.
I think it was a reactionary move exactly because of the previous point which from my perspective is transparent. If I see it, so do PlayStation execs. Maybe they believe they can foster Housemarque, I don’t. The question is, who else could PlayStaiton acquire in this current industry-wide land grab? This was the cheapest option that at least made sense on paper, but they couldn’t not respond to Xbox’s growing number of studios if nothing else than the sheer quantity of content posing a threat.
