Sony Is Buying The Remaster Powerhouse Behind All Those Rad Remakes

Sony Is Buying The Remaster Powerhouse Behind All Those Rad Remakes

Bluepoint Games is joining the PlayStation family. For real this time. Three months after Sony let the news slip in a rapidly deleted tweet, the PS5 maker has made it official.

“Today I’m very excited to announce that PlayStation Studios has grown again with the addition of long-time partner Bluepoint Games,” PlayStation Studios boss, Herman Hulst, wrote in a blog post today. “Bluepoint has raised the bar on console-defining visuals and gameplay, and the studio’s vast expertise in world building and character creation will be a huge plus for future PlayStation Studios properties.”

Founded in 2006 by former Retro Studios developers Andy O’Neil and Marco Thrush, Bluepoint Games has long been best known for its remasters, remakes, and HD ports of popular PlayStation exclusives like God of War and Metal Gear Solid. Most recently, the Texas-based studio remade Shadow of the Colossus for PS4 and Demon’s Souls for the PS5, both of which were excellent.

Sony had previously revealed its plans to buy Bluepoint in an image for a June 29 tweet that was actually supposed to announce the purchase of the studio behind PS5’s Returnal, Housemarque. Even before the tweet, many had long suspected something might be in the works, given that Bluepoint had effectively been working exclusively with Sony for years.

“We’re very selective about the developers that we bring in,” Hulst said in a June interview with British GQ, appearing to draw a contrast with Microsoft’s recent spending spree that included forking out over $US7 ($10) billion for Bethesda Softworks.

The Bluepoint and Housemarque acquisitions come two years after Sony bought Insomniac Games, and at a time when the gaming industry is consolidating, with Microsoft and other big players buying up smaller studios and publishers. Former PlayStation executive Shawn Layden has been particularly critical of the recent trend, which has been spurred on in part by ballooning game development costs.

“Consolidation is the enemy of diversity in some ways,” he told GamesIndustry.biz in July. “It takes a lot of playing pieces off the table as they grow into these larger conglomerates.”

For now, Bluepoint plans to start making its own games again. “Our next project, we’re working on original content right now,” Thrush, currently studio president, told IGN in an interview today. “We can’t talk about what that is, but that’s the next step in the evolution for us.”


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