Sony Is Launching a PlayStation Studios Brand
As well as confirming the PlayStation 5 is definitely going to launch before the end of 2020, Sony has this week announced it’s set to launch a new brand to cover all first-party PlayStation games.
As Gamesindustry.biz reports, the new brand is called PlayStation Studios, and it even has its own video introduction which we can expect to see included in future PS4 and PS5 titles, or any titles ported to other platforms such as on PC. You can watch it below and try and spot all the first-party game characters it contains.
Any game “developed and managed by Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios organization” will carry the PlayStation Studios branding, which includes developers not owned by Sony, but working under the company’s direction. The branding will appear later this year on new titles, but won’t be ready for the highly-anticipated first-party PS4 titles The Last of Us: Part II and Ghosts of Tsushima, or the PC port of Horizon: Zero Dawn.
As to why Sony is launching a new brand, Eric Lempel, senior vice president and head of global marketing at Sony Interactive Entertainment, explains that “Over the last few years — and even the last decade — the strength of the titles coming out from our studios has been stronger than ever. We have been thinking about how we unite all of these great games under one brand, and really the purpose of that is to make the consumer understand that, when they see this brand, they’re getting ready for a robust, innovative, deep experience that they’ve come to expect from games coming from PlayStation.”
Sony owns 14 different games studios, including Guerilla Games, Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Polyphony, and Sucker Punch to name but a few. Having one brand to represent them all, as Lempel explains, “We think this is a good way to let consumers know that, if they see it, then the quality games they’ve come to expect from us are here.”
The PlayStation Studios brand is clearly being rolled out just in time for the launch of the PS5, where first-party, and therefore exclusive titles will play a major role in securing hardware sales. Sony may also be reacting to moves Microsoft has made in recent years to bolster its own first-party studio line-up under the Xbox Game Studios brand, which expanded to include Ninja Theory, Compulsion Games, Playground Games, and Undead Labs back in 2018.
