Sony killing Bluepoint Games is PlayStation’s latest big failure

Sony is shutting down Bluepoint Games, the developer behind 2018’s Shadow of the Colossus remake and the PlayStation 5 launch game Demon’s Souls, in the latest blow to its roster of PlayStation Studios. Bluepoint will be the third Sony-owned studio to be axed in the past two years, following the closures of mobile-focused developer Neon Koi and Concord creator Firewalk Studios.

While any game studio closure is disheartening, as years of work go unfinished and unplayed, and hundreds of people lose jobs, Bluepoint Games’ shuttering feels markedly different from Sony’s other cuts. Bluepoint had a track record of success, acting as a go-to developer of remakes and remasters, having been entrusted with Metal Gear Solid and God of War collections. The Austin, Texas-based developer was oft-cited as the studio of choice when PlayStation fans fantasized about a potential remake of a beloved game or franchise.

That fantasy hasn’t aligned with the reality of Bluepoint’s work since being acquired by Sony in 2021, however. The studio expressed a desire to transition away from restoring others’ work to become a team that worked on original games, according to Bluepoint co-founder and president Marco Thrush.

“Our team is a very highly experienced team,” Thrush told IGN in 2021, shortly after Bluepoint was acquired. “The average experience among most people is about 15 years, and all of them come from original development. It’s not like we’re a bunch of developers that got trained up on making remasters and remakes. We have that original game development mindset in our hearts, and that’s what we’re now ready, finally ready with the support of Sony to push forward and show what we can do, and show what PlayStation can do.”

Bluepoint’s unannounced original project was reportedly a live-service game based on the God of War franchise, part of Sony’s once-enthusiastic (and since reconsidered) plan to flood the market with more live-service multiplayer games. Bluepoint’s God of War game was reportedly scrapped in early 2025, and subsequent pitches weren’t greenlit by Sony, leading to the developer’s closure.

PlayStation fans seem rightfully angry at the closure of Bluepoint, which still held promise for them as a team that could faithfully and lovingly make old games shine anew. With no shortage of potential remake and remaster candidates in PlayStation’s catalog (e.g., Bloodborne), the promise of Bluepoint as an internal PlayStation studio now feels unnecessarily squandered. While the closures of Neon Koi and Firewalk may have stung, the decision to shutter those studios seemed sound at the time, as PlayStation’s half-hearted attempts to capture the mobile market and the abject failure of Concord spelled doom for those developers.

Sony went on a spending spree over the past seven years, adding 11 studios — a mix of dedicated developers and support studios — to its roster. Three of them have since shuttered, and a handful haven’t shipped games in many years. We’re still waiting on Haven Studios’ shooter Fairgames, announced in 2023, and new, current-generation projects from established studios like Bend Studio, Media Molecule, and Naughty Dog.

It’s been an ugly and often unproductive half-decade for PlayStation. Veteran teams like London Studios and Japan Studio have been shut down, and hundreds of layoffs have impacted Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla Games, and SIE’s Technology, Creative, and Support divisions in recent years. Sony’s acquisition of Destiny developer Bungie increasingly feels like a mismanaged multi-billion-dollar investment, especially when that studio was charged with serving as PlayStation’s guiding light when it came to live-service games.

Many of the missteps at PlayStation can be chalked up to a confluence of factors, including changing consumer tastes, ripple effects from the COVID-19 pandemic, the increasingly untenable cost of developing video games, and misguided ambition, especially when it comes to trying to keep 10 or more live-service games in the air. But the closure of Bluepoint feels more than misguided. It’s one of the most prominent, most embarrassing failures for PlayStation this generation. Sony swallowed up and spit out a proven, fan-favorite developer in pursuit of an impossible goal, leaving behind a great deal of promise and dozens of talented game developers now out of work.