Sony Corp.s Visual Arts Service Group has long been the unsung hero of many hit PlayStation video games. The San Diego-based operation helps finish off games designed at other Sony-owned studios with animation, art or other content and development. But about three years ago, a handful of influential figures within the Visual Arts Service Group decided they wanted to have more creative control and lead game direction rather than being supporting actors on popular titles such as Spider-Man and Uncharted.
Michael Mumbauer, who founded the Visual Arts Service Group in 2007, recruited a group of about 30 developers, internally and from neighboring game studios, to form a new development unit within Sony. The idea was to expand upon some of the companys most successful franchises and the team began working on a remake of the 2013 hit The Last of Us for the PlayStation 5. But Sony never fully acknowledged the teams existence or gave them the funding and support needed to succeed in the highly competitive video game market, according to people involved. The studio never even got its own name. Instead, Sony moved ownership of the The Last of Us remake to its original creator, Naughty Dog, a Sony-owned studio behind many of the companys best-selling games and an HBO television series in development.
Deflated, the small groups leadership has largely disbanded, according to interviews with eight people familiar with the operation. Many, including Mumbauer, have left the company entirely. Mumbauer declined to comment and others asked not to be named discussing private information. A representative for Sony declined to comment or provide interviews.
The teams failure highlights the complex hierarchy of video game development and in particular, Sonys conservative approach to making games for the PlayStation 5. The Japanese conglomerate owns about a dozen studios across the world as part of its PlayStation Studios label, but in recent years it has prioritized games made by its most successful developers. Studios such as Santa Monica, California-based Naughty Dog and Amsterdam-based Guerrilla Games spend tens of millions of dollars to make games with the expectation that the investments will pay off exponentially. And they usually do. Hits including 2018s God of War and 2020s The Last of Us Part II are exclusive to PlayStation consoles, helping Sony sell some 114 million of the PS4. Rival Microsoft Corp. has taken the opposite approach, relying on a wide array of studios to feed its Netflix-like subscription service, Xbox Game Pass, which allows users to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to a variety of games.
Sonys focus on exclusive blockbusters has come at the expense of niche teams and studios within the PlayStation organization, leading to high turnover and less choice for players. Last week, Sony reorganized a development office in Japan, resulting in mass departures of people who worked on less well-known but acclaimed games such as Gravity Rush and Everybody's Golf. The company has informed developers that it no longer wants to produce smaller games that are only successful in Japan, Bloomberg has reported.
This fixation on teams that churn out hits is creating unrest across Sony's portfolio of game studios. Oregon-based Sony Bend, best known for the 2019 open-world action game Days Gone, tried unsuccessfully to pitch a sequel that year, according to people familiar with the proposal. Although the first game had been profitable, its development had been lengthy and critical reception was mixed, so a Days Gone 2 wasnt seen as a viable option.
Instead, one team at the studio was assigned to help Naughty Dog with a multiplayer game while a second group was assigned to work on a new Uncharted game with supervision from Naughty Dog. Some staff, including top leads, were unhappy with this arrangement and left. Bend's developers feared they might be absorbed into Naughty Dog, and the studios leadership asked to be taken off the Uncharted project. They got their wish last month and are now working on a new game of their own.
Emphasizing big hits can also be counterproductive because sometimes games that start small can turn into massive successes. In 2020, Sony didnt put much marketing muscle behind the quirky video game creation system Dreams, by the PlayStation-owned Media Molecule in the U.K. As a result, PlayStation may have missed out on its own version of Roblox, a similar video game tool. Parent company Roblox Corp. went public earlier this year and is now valued at $45 billion.
For their first solo project, Mumbauer and his crew wanted to pitch something that would be well received by their bosses at Sony. Recognizing the risks and expense involved with developing a new game from scratch, they decided to focus on remaking older games for the new PlayStation 5. Remakes are considered a safe bet since its cheaper to update and polish an old game than it is to start from scratch, and they can be sold both to nostalgic old fans and curious new ones. The team originally planned on a remake of the first Uncharted game, released by Naughty Dog in 2007. That idea quickly fizzled because it would be expensive and require too much added design work. Instead, the team settled on a remake of Naughty Dogs 2013 melancholic zombie hit, The Last of Us.
At the time, Naughty Dog was in the thick of development on the sequel, The Last of Us Part II, which would introduce higher-fidelity graphics and new gameplay features. If Mumbauers crew remade the first game to have a similar look and feel, the two games could be packaged together for the PlayStation 5. In theory, this would be a less expensive proposition than remaking Uncharted, since The Last of Us was more modern and wouldnt require too many gameplay overhauls. Then, once Mumbauers group had established itself, it could go on to remake the first Uncharted game and other titles down the road.
But pivoting from doing finishing work for other games to making your own is difficult, since original development teams are competing against hundreds of other teams from all over the world, with varying levels of experiences and successes, said Dave Lang, founder of Iron Galaxy Studios, which has served as a support team and a development studio.
The people funding the work are often risk-averse, and if they have to pick between a team thats done it before, and someone trying to do it on their own for the first time, I can see why some people pick the prior developer over the latter, he said.
Thats just what Sony did. Mumbauers project, code-named T1X, was approved on a probationary basis, but Sony kept the teams existence a secret, and refused to give them a budget to hire more people, leading many to wonder if the company was really committed to letting the team build a new studio. Still, the small team kept working and by the spring of 2019 they had completed a section of the game designed to showcase how the rest would look and feel.