Sony Japan ‘Has Been Left Out’ From PlayStation 5 Launch, New Report Says

Sony’s home territory of Japan has been “sidelined” in promotional planning for the PlayStation 5 and has seen its development teams downsized, as the company places more emphasis on the US market.

That’s according to a new report from Bloomberg, which claims that PlayStation 4’s disappointing performance in Japan, as well as PlayStation’s decision to move its headquarters to California in 2016, saw its input drastically reduced for its latest console.

PlayStation’s North American arm, Sony Interactive Entertainment America, has seen its influence grow dramatically over the past four years, VGC reported in October 2019, following the platform owner’s push towards a structure. centralized world.

The process has resulted in a significant number of layoffs across its European operations over the past 18 months, as leadership has shifted to California.

According to Bloomberg sources at PlayStation’s headquarters in San Mateo, the US office has been frustrated with Japanese marketing for the PS4, which it says has resulted in lower console sales compared to its predecessor (around 10 million dollars). ‘units).

As a result, Japan has been “sidelined” in the planning to promote the PlayStation 5, according to several Japanese PlayStation employees cited by Bloomberg. Employees in Tokyo said they were awaiting instructions from California, he said.

The US office’s critical view of the Japanese operation also had an impact on its game development efforts, he claims.

The Japanese PlayStation studio, which has co-developed games such as Bloodborne, Astro’s Playroom and The Last Guardian, has seen the contracts of several of its creators not renewed, former employees have reportedly told Bloomberg.

Japan-based developer support teams have also been downsized by a third from their peak, he said.

The U.S. office believes that the PlayStation business doesn’t need games that only work in Japan, employees at the California headquarters said.

Responding to Bloomberg’s report, Sony spokeswoman Natsumi Atarashi said that “our home market remains of the utmost importance” and asserted that any suggestion that Sony was diverting its attention from Japan was incorrect and “does not reflect the company’s strategy ”.

Speaking to VGC Network Partners at GamesIndustry.biz last year, Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan insisted the company was not Americanizing after it was centralized in California.

Ryan said the new-look organization was designed to be more efficient ahead of the PlayStation 5’s launch in 2020.

“I really want to emphasize that globalization doesn’t mean Americanization, or vice versa,” he said.

“Becoming a global organization does not in any way mean becoming an American organization. I’m living proof of that, as a good Geordie boy sitting here on PlayStation. “

Another European, Guerrilla Games co-founder Hermen Hulst, was named the new director of PlayStation’s global studios last November. The move saw former Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida leave the post to lead a new initiative dealing with small independent studios.

In the past, regional branches of PlayStation were able to act on their own, signing their own games and setting their own marketing budgets.

This allowed regional departments in the US, Europe and Japan to respond specifically to their own audiences, but also had the downside of creating a disjoint group operation, with which some third-party publishers reportedly expressed frustration.

Ryan told GI: “The nature of PlayStation 4 AAA and certainly the development of PlayStation 5… We’re obviously not going to ask Worldwide Studios to make a game for a specific European country. And that could have been the case in the PSP era with Invizimals [which was popular in Spain].

“I think that will be the new task of Shuhei Yoshida [of working with indies] If we are agile, flexible and inclusive, we can work with smaller developers to help meet the specific needs of those countries. “

Ryan also told the site: “If we are to be successful, we have to really take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalization. I’ll give you some examples. The first concerns the production of PlayStation 5, the definition of all the features, the development and the implementation of these features.

“This process, this time around, has been much more streamlined than anything we’ve done in the past. Product planners now have one conversation instead of three different regional conversations, where they had to reconcile often conflicting or contradictory positions, with an endless process of iteration and consensus. It doesn’t happen anymore. We have a conversation and we go on and do things. “