Ex-PlayStation boss, Shawn Layden, has laid down the brass tax as to why Japan Studio was closed down. It mainly boils down to a lack of smash-hit games post-PS3 era.
Speaking with IGN, the former PS bigwig asserted that the studio didn’t release hit games for a “while.” Chalking it up to the PS3 era, it was hard for major studios that made waves in the PS1 and PS2 spaces to keep that same momentum on the next console and if they did, they were just lucky.
“That was sad. It wasn’t necessarily a surprise. I love Allan [Becker, former head of Japan Studio], and he worked really hard, but there was so much legacy malaise. It’s tough when a studio hasn’t had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels. You know, if you have a hit once it’s it’s like a drug, man, you’re chasing the next one, right? And then if you don’t have that for a while, you forget what it felt like, and then you start to forget how to get there.”
Later in the interview, he associated the whole situation to pruning a bonsai, as it’s all about bringing it back to square one and growing it back up again. Meanwhile, he touches on studios like Capcom and Bandai Namco as being in a good spot while others like Square Enix and Konami are struggling.
“But, you know, Capcom is prosecuting that problem fairly directly. I think Sega finds itself in a pretty good place. Bandai Namco has got some refactoring to do. Koei Tecmo has its market, owns that market, and they seem happy with that…How many different versions of FF7 have been made?! Square Enix. I think when they abandoned their overseas developer/publisher ambitions and brought it back to home truths, that was a good move for them, but it’ll still take a while for them to get out of the woods.”