Although acquiring both Bungie and Haven Studios within the past two months, Playstation plans to acquire even more studios over the course of 2022. Jim Ryan, Sony’s president, discussed the possibility of more acquisitions on the Official Playstation Podcast.
On the podcast, Jim Ryan said “We’re growing our studios organically and we’re growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021. We’re in discussions with Bungie and we have more planned. This is getting us into a cycle, a virtuous cycle where success begets success.”
Since 2021, Sony has acquired various studios to develop their games. These acquisitions include Firesprite, Bluepoint Games, Nixxes Software, Housemarque, and Valkyrie Entertainment. Additionally, both Haven Studios and Bungie were acquired early in 2022. Bungie sold for an astonishing $3.6 billion when the purchase was announced on January 31. These acquisitions bring the total number of in-house studios to 18 total.
Jim Ryan continued on the podcast when he said “We’re in a really good place with PlayStation Studios right now, and we have been for the past few years. The critical success and the commercial success of the games that they’ve been making, that has given us permission to invest heavily in content creation.”
According to Ryan, the investment in studios is the reason why Sony is not including first-party games in their Playstation Plus Tiers. Ryan believes that the cycle of content creation would not be possible with the inclusion of first-party games to Playstation Plus.
As Sony looks ahead for the rest of 2022, the company is expecting to make some major moves for more developers. These moves will likely grow the size of the already large company and really increase the following by players. The next few months will be very interesting as Sony will be looking for more acquisitions that build upon their previous success.