Shunsuke Saito—the character designer and animator for Gravity Rush and Gravity Rush 2, as well as art director for Gravity Rush 2—has left Sony Interactive Entertainment JAPAN Studio, …
www.gematsu.com
I am losing so much faith in PlayStation and Sony as a gaming entity.
Sony Studio Japan gets shut down and everyone of those people that made those games is leaving. Not only have they made some of my favorite games but they've made my favorite Playstation games and sony ran them out. Not profitable enough. I get that. I get that your average wanker only cares about the trends, what everyone else is playing and brand recognition. The thing is, and I've said this before, Sony has thrown away some outstanding gaming experiences to the curve in order to make the same game with a different skin time and time again. Take any of the games in their new logo, replace the characters in each with one another and you'll only be able to tell them apart when you put enemies in the background, and even then, it's not going to be much of an alteration to incorporate them to their new setting.
Gravity Rush 2 managed to become a personal favorite of mine even before I finished it and with this the promise of a 3rd game is dead and buried. Sony and Playstation keep distancing themselves from all forms of Japanese gaming while, ironically, trying to monopolize on anime because, let's face it, it's profitable. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, your employees all have to eat and live, but it's not as passable when you think about it and realize that they would not hesitate to discard it all the moment they got no money from it anymore. Hell, if they saw enough crying from social media they'd weight the benefit of kicking it overboard to profit margin and go with whichever one they can bleed more.
Not only that but now they are shutting down the store for anything that's not current gen. Playstation did this on purpose. I wouldn't have thought so before but with Microsoft putting a backwards compatible machine with notably less effort than Playstation is doing you know that this is their shortsightedness coming back to bite them. The PS3 is a perfect example of poor decision making when they went for complicated engineering over continuing the infrastructure they had before. Closing those stores shows me, once again, that they are only interested in chasing the cash flow, not in maintaining, preserving or even progressing the industry, the artform, they are working on, just the money that it makes them.
Why would anyone give brand loyalty to a brand that shows no loyalty? Well, I know why. I've done it. I've been there. Not so much anymore. So much of what drew me in to it they are discarding. Make no mistake, right now they are trying to distance themselves from the Japanese gaming market as much as they can, to not be thought of as a Japanese brand but if, for whatever reason, there was a surge in popularity for Japanese games again they would try to move their headquarters back to Osaka and try to play it off as some 'we were here all along' BS before you knew it.
Like the film industry, you have to make money. That's what those big blockbusters are for. That's what most people will see and how you sustain your company but you also make things that are long lasting. For every 10 garbage horror movies there was an Exorcist or Psycho, for every Transformers film catalog you got a Mad Max. For every stupid Twilight type movie you got A Letter to 3 Wives or a Casablanca. They might not be the ones that bring in the cash but they are the ones that lasted. To me, that's what playstation threw away. The things that lasted and the only reason I never switched, no pun intended, was because I had a huge collection of digital games dating back to the PSP. Well, bollocks to that, ey.