The closure of Sony’s Japan Studio “wasn’t necessarily a surprise” to former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden, who likened it to “pruning a bonsai”.
Japan Studio was responsible for some of PlayStation’s biggest hits over the years, from Ape Escape and Legend of Dragoon, to Shadow of the Colossus and Gravity Rush. In 2021 the studio was effectively disbanded, with Astro Bot’s internal Team Asobi going independent as a PlayStation studio.
Speaking with IGN Japan at Gamescom Asia, Layden discussed the end of Japan Studio and “legacy malaise”.
“That was sad,” he said. “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 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.”
In 2017 Japan Studio released Knack 2 and a year later Team Asobi released VR game Astro Bot Rescue Mission. Besides these, the studio was mostly used for support work and left without a hit project to work on.
Layden suggested this issue was prevalent “across the Japanese market”. He compared the situation with other Japanese studios, in particular noting Square Enix’s decision to close its overseas studios was “a good move”.
“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,” he said of the industry in Japan.
“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 FF7 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.”
“Japan Studio’s original output was infrequent and erratic, which only made it all the easier to love,” wrote former Eurogamer editor Martin Robinson lamenting the closure of Japan Studio.
Two of the studio’s biggest successes were Ape Escape and LocoRoco, both of which are heavily referenced in the latest Astro Bot game, which now has its speedrun DLC releasing each week.
Layden also spoke last week at Gamescom Asia about a “collapse of creativity” in the industry, stating relying on blockbusters is “a death sentence”.