Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has been away from the company for five years now, but he's still got plenty to say about how things are going in Sony's gaming division. And in a recent interview at Gamescom Asia conducted by IGN Japan, he reflected on the 2021 reorganization and subsequent mass exodus of talent from Sony Japan Studio, giving a bit of context as to why he thinks the dissolution happened in the first place.
The remnants of Japan Studio were recentered around Astrobot developer Team Asobi, which later that year was moved into PlayStation Studios. Though Layden was not involved in any of the aforementioned decisions, having departed Sony in 2019, he still had thoughts on why the studio was effectively disbanded.
"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 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."
Layden is referring to Japan Studio's struggles to produce a hit in the years leading up to its dissolution. Though Astro Bot Rescue Mission was considered a success (and likely factored into the decision to retain Team Asobi), Japan Studio had otherwise largely been relegated to support work after 2017's Knack 2 release. Layden doesn't think this problem was exclusive to Japan Studio, though:
"And sadly, I think you can see that problem across the Japanese market," he continued. "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.
"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."
The trouble with Japanese development, said Layden, can be traced back to the PlayStation 3 generation. While Japanese teams like Square Enix, Namco, Konami, and Capcom owned the PlayStation 1 and 2 eras, the technical shift around the PS3 caused some legacy studios to struggle.
"In the PlayStation 1 era, Takara Tomi was making money back then," he said. "They basically took their experience in the arcade business and translated it to the home, right? That was the selling point. PlayStation 1, Ridge Racer in your house, Tekken in your house. But the way you develop an arcade experience is completely different from how you develop a console experience. Now, PlayStation 1, they just translated it, and that seemed to be enough, because it was novel.
"[But] that skill set and expertise didn't really translate into the console experience. And then when you got to PS3, and you had the Cell processor, and how do you code for that? And it was no longer an upgraded arcade experience, it was a high-end PC experience you're offering at home. And I think that's where the disconnect came for a lot of Japanese developers. And Japanese developers have been struggling ever since to try to get back to the top of the top of Olympus."
The dissolution of Japan Studio was a sad affair. Its remnants, Team Asobi, have since been merged into PlayStation Studios and just last month released Astro Bot, which we gave a 9/10.
"Astro Bot made me smile from beginning to end," our reviewer wrote. "A collection of endlessly inventive levels and fantastically fun abilities, it delivers joy in spades, never once becoming even remotely dull or repetitive."
Sony has since confirmed it will get post-launch speedrun levels and additional Special Bots, which have already begun rolling out and will continue on a weekly basis.
Rebekah Valentine is a Senior Reporter at IGN.
Daniel Robson is Chief Editor of IGN Japan. Follow him on twitter here.
