Sony has announced that they have welcomed Firewalk Studios to the PlayStation Family. The odd thing about this announcement? They haven’t made a game yet.
While being touted as a AAA studio simply due to the experienced developers involved, the studio has yet to produce a game. The studio has been developing a multiplayer game since 2021 that was already announced to be part of a PlayStation partnership, and Sony potentially has seen the progress, but that’s all we know so far. The studio notes “support by Sony for the initial vision has been overwhelming.”
So maybe Sony has seen enough and feels this is going to be pretty big? Or perhaps it has something to do with bringing Bungie closer together? Firewalk Studios was the first major developer to be announced with ProbablyMonsters, an indie group led by Bungie ex CEO Harold Ryan. Sony recently finalized a deal to acquire Bungie itself and has been utilizing that team to help with live service developments in other areas of PlayStation.
Sony also recently purchased Haven Studios led by Jade Raymond, which also has yet to release a game. They too are working on a multiplayer focused title for PlayStation, which means 3 new acquisitions are all targeting the multiplayer world, and we haven’t seen one.
Up to this point it has been pretty clear that Sony has dominated the single player story driven world with titles like The Last of Us, Spider-Man, and God of War. Hopefully Sony is not losing track of that and instead focusing on live service adventures, but adding multiplayer to this line up would also be welcoming if we were to get both.
With Sony potentially losing Call of Duty, one way or another, or simply not wanting the franchise to be used to lift up a competitor, it makes sense that Sony wants to try and find a replacement. It also makes sense to bring in new teams to focus on multiplayer instead of taking away teams that have already found success making story driven games. Multiplayer games have been the highlight of video game sales reports as of late. Games such as Apex and Fortnite have brought in billions of dollars acting as live service titles, while single player story driven titles basically are one and done.
But this is where things are a little odd for me because Sony recently worked with Ember Lab, the creators of Kena: Bridge of Spirits which is arguably one of the best games released on PlayStation. Perhaps they have no intention of being acquired, but they at least have a game to present and are working on another title as well. Kena alone proved that this team could very easily expand on the franchise, or even pick up one of the many sleeping franchises under PlayStation (ahem, Jak and Daxter) and run with it without forcing another studio to step away from a major project.
No matter the road being taken, it seems at some point Sony is going to have to finally give us a showcase of some sort. They’ve been quiet for a really long time now, only showing glimpses of new games via State Of Play, but they have several studios now that have games we haven’t seen yet. While Microsoft is buying up major publishers, Sony has been targeting smaller teams with a clear focus in the online world, which is also helping strengthen their already robust PlayStation teams. Several of those teams also have games in production that we haven’t seen anything from.
