The Sony Playstation is thriving even during the pandemic. They’re reporting their workforce grew by 20%, looking to “aggressively invest” in new studios.
So far, the Sony Playstation brand is growing bigger and bigger, with the Sony Interactive Entertainment workforce growing by 20% this year.
This year alone, Playstation picked up several studios under its umbrella. From what it seems, the company is looking to build its subsidiaries even further.
Sony acquired several valuable studios
Since the beginning of the year, Sony has been busy acquiring studios left and right. For starters, Playstation acquired Housemarque, known for its hit title Returnal. The gaming giant also acquired Firesprite UK, which comprised of former SIE Liverpool devs.
One strong acquisition they had for this year is Nixxes Software, which is a PC porting specialist studio. They come as Sony is looking to launch Playstation PC – their foray into their future PC releases. There’s also Bluepoint Games, which is behind several Playstation remakes and remasters.
Following this week’s quarterly results, Sony talked about their plans for more acquisitions.
“To further strengthen our software development capabilities, we announced the acquisition of Firesprite in September and Bluepoint Games this month,” said Sony CFO and executive deputy president Hiroki Totoki.
“Both companies have excellent technical capabilities and superb track records and they have contributed to the development of many of our game software titles.
“Going forward, we plan to leverage these studios to increase the development capability of PlayStation Studios and to use the expertise necessary to deploy games to PC and mobile devices.
“As a result of the acquisitions announced since the beginning of this fiscal year, the number of PlayStation studios will increase by four to 16, and the number of developers will increase by almost 20%.
“We plan to continue to aggressively invest in our development capability going forward.”
Sony grows to compete with Microsoft, Nintendo
Sony Playstation’s rapid growth comes through a period of extreme growth for the entire industry. The release of the PS5, as well as the release of high-quality titles like God of War and Returnal, is creating unprecedented growth for the company.
According to the last quarter’s numbers, the Playstation brand shipped as many as 3.3 million Playstation 5 consoles. This pushes up their lifetime sales to 13.4 million, which is still neck and neck with the Xbox.
Sony Playstation is looking to acquire more studios to compete with the rapid expansion of their competition. Xbox, for example, acquired Bethesda last year.
Featured image courtesy of Playstation/Youtube Screenshot