The company’s acquisition of Returnal developer Housemarque in June sparked rumours that Sony might buy the developer. That’s when the PlayStation Japan Twitter account unintentionally shared a PlayStation Studios splash image with key art from both Returnal and Demon’s Souls, as well as other well-known Sony titles.
After months of speculation, Sony has officially confirmed that Bluepoint Games, the developer of Demon’s Souls, has been acquired.
The inclusion of Bluepoint to the PlayStation Studios roster shouldn’t come as a surprise to many. The Austin-based firm made waves with its Shadow of the Colossus remake in 2018, and now it’s working on a PS5 recreation of FromSoftware’s Demon’s. It’s been a long-time independent partner with Sony, remastering critical favourites like Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, and Gravity Rush, and working almost solely on PlayStation-branded properties. (Aside from Metal Gear, Bluepoint’s sole other third-party effort was the Xbox 360 port of Titanfall in 2014.)
Making Bluepoint’s partnership with PlayStation official was a natural choice, according to PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst in an interview with IGN.
“There’s rarely an organisation imaginable that knows PlayStation better than Bluepoint,” Hulst told the publication, “because they’ve worked with so many different teams on their separate, iconic franchises that they’ve had a developer insight in a great way.”
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Though Bluepoint has been known for its remasters and current remakes—with speculations circulating after the release of Demon’s Souls that the studio was working on a Metal Gear Solid remake—President Marco Thrush indicated in the same interview that the studio’s next project will be an original game.
“We’re currently working on original content for our future project. We can’t say exactly what it is, but it’s the next step in our evolution “IGN was informed by Thrush. Thrush, a former member of Retro Studios’ Metroid Prime team, knows how to bring a cherished title back to life. In 2006, he co-founded Bluepoint with Andy O’Neil, and the company quickly established itself as a technological powerhouse known for delivering industry-standard remasters rather than launching brand-new, popular titles.
When it comes to introducing new studios, Xbox is following a different set of rules than PlayStation. Over the last two years, Microsoft has acquired a number of firms, including Double Fine Productions, which worked on Psychonauts 2, and, most notably, the entire Bethesda slate, which includes Doom’s id Software and Wolfenstein’s MachineGames, under its parent company, ZeniMax Media.
Unlike PlayStation, however, practically all of Xbox’s first-party games debut on the Xbox Game Pass service, which gamers can enjoy on-demand from Xbox consoles, PCs, tablets, and phones (with its Azure-powered cloud gaming infrastructure planned to add even more devices in the future). For the most part, Sony has preferred to keep its first-party exclusives sealed to PlayStation platforms, though it has recently begun to warm to the concept of porting some of its best-selling games to PC.
Bluepoint is Sony’s fourth first-party studio to join the company this year. It follows Housemarque, Nixxes, and Firesprite (manufacturer of the previous PSVR), all of whom are based in the United Kingdom.
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