Former PlayStation boss says Japan Studio was closed because the company wanted AAA games

Over the years PlayStation games have changed a lot as the company is now focusing on providing big-budget games with better visuals and deep narrative. Former Sony Interactive Entertainment, ‘Shuhei Yoshida’, revealed this to be the reason why Japan Studio was shut down back in 2021 as the company wanted more focus on AAA games.

In an interview with AV Watch, Yoshida said that the company wanted games that would result in hardware sales. “I was in charge of the first-party side of things, so I was asked to make a game that would sell the hardware. If we made something like that, the company would really push for it,” he said.

PlayStation shifted focus towards AAA games

As the tech improved, so did the PlayStation consoles with each generation. Games could be much larger in scale and the company expected games that align with it. Yoshida the creators had a lot of interesting ideas for a game, but they were all AA in scope and turned down and weren’t exactly meant to showcase the hardware’s power which was important for competing against Xbox at the time.

“Japanese creators come up with some very creative and interesting stuff, but it always ends up being ‘AA size’. That's also the reason why JAPAN Studio disappeared after I left my position as President of Worldwide Studios. At that time, JAPAN Studio was a studio and a team that was good at making AAs,” Yoshida said.

“So, even though we created ‘interesting Japanese-style games,’ companies were not very keen to push them, and there was a time when we struggled to make a return on our investment,” he further added.

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AA games remain the building block for PlayStation

While AAA games are the ones catching everyone’s attention in the gaming market, AA games laid the foundation from where games got even bigger in scope. A good example is Naughty Dog, the creators behind ‘Last of Us’ and ‘Uncharted’ who started with games like Crash Bandicoot. With the closure of JAPAN Studio a lot of IPs like Knack, Ape Escape, and others lie dormant.