Today Sony announced a new name for its first-party games: PlayStation Studios.
PlayStation Studios will consist of Sony’s internal studios like Naughty Dog, Insomniac Games, and Santa Monica Studio. The news was announced alongside a video of a new opening cinematic that will play before each PlayStation Studios game starts on your console. It shows off some of the company’s most iconic characters, like Uncharted’s Nathan Drake and Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy, their faces reflected in giant X, O, square, and triangle buttons. Unfortunately older Playstation stars, like PaRappa the Rapper, didn’t make the cut.
“Over the last few years—and even the last decade—the strength of the titles coming out from our studios has been stronger than ever,” Eric Lempel, head of global marketing at Sony Interactive Entertainment, told Gamesindustry.biz in an interview. “We have been thinking about how we unite all of these great games under one brand, and really the purpose of that is to make the consumer understand that, when they see this brand, they’re getting ready for a robust, innovative, deep experience that they’ve come to expect from games coming from PlayStation. So we came up with PlayStation Studios.”
Notably, the move comes just a little over a year since Microsoft did something similar with its internal studios. After acquiring developers like Obsidian Entertainment and Ninja Theory, it rebranded its first-party games as being made by Xbox Game Studios. The two logos are also remarkably similar, both featuring the Xbox and Playstation icons respectively in white atop the word “studios.”
Sony’s PlayStation Studios opening animation looks a little familiar… pic.twitter.com/FR7UtJhwL3
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) May 12, 2020
I’m going to tell my grandkids this logo-off is what the console wars were.
According to Gamesindustry this new PlayStation Studios branding won’t arrive in time for The Last of Us Part II or Ghosts of Tsushima, coming in June and July respectively. While it’s unclear what game will be the first to feature the new cinematic, Gamesindustry writes it will arrive once the PS5 launches—a system we still have not seen, because hey, why show off your next gen hardware when you could keep teasing fans with glimpses of its controller and studio rebrands instead?
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