Sony Buys Former Wipeout Developers In Their Latest Acquisition

Not content with letting Microsoft buy up all the studios, Sony has publicly wrapped up their third major acquisition in the last few months.

This time, it’s the Liverpool-based Firesprite that’ll become a first-party Sony property. Firesprite are the studio behind The Playroom for PS4 and PSVR, although they’ve also done a lot of work as a co-development studio. But what’s neat is the acquisition represents a bit of coming home. Firesprite is also made up of a bunch of former Studio Liverpool developers, the first-party Sony studio that was responsible for the superb anti-grav Wipeout games.

“PlayStation also gave us the opportunity to create our own IP, The Persistence, and we were given the creative freedom to explore, innovate, and release a survival horror game we are immensely proud of,” Graeme Ankers, Firesprite’s managing director said in an announcement. “Now, as a first party studio, we know we have the full support of PlayStation in furthering our heritage of combining creativity and technical innovation to offer some truly unique experiences for PlayStation fans.”

The studio is Sony’s third acquisition this year, following in the steps of Housemarque (Returnal, Nex Machina) and Nixxes, the co-development studio and PC porting specialists which worked on Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Marvel’s Avengers.

Firesprite had also been assisting on the Theaters of War multiplayer mode for Star Citizen. The mode was designed to be a multi-part 20 vs 20 player co-op/competitive mode in Star Citizen. The mode was split into three parts, involving traditional close-quarters control FPS gameplay, before moving into modes with larger maps, vehicles and eventually a dogfight over a space station in orbit, where players would dock at the station and then battle in FPS mode once more.