Has the Market for AA Games on PS5 Really Disappeared? | Push Square

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Shuhei Yoshida noted in an interview this week that the reason for Tokyo-based developer Japan Studio’s closure was because the market for AA games has disappeared.

Sony’s much-loved internal studio produced a variety of smaller-scale PlayStation exclusives over the years, including Patapon and Gravity Rush. It also played an important role in bringing externally developed titles to Sony’s consoles, like Everybody’s Golf from Clap-Hanz and Tokyo Jungle from Crispy’s.

But it wasn’t just Japan Studio that was so prolific in this category: through the PS3 and PS4 era, Sony found enormous success publishing a wide-range of smaller games around the world, from Invizimals to Sound Shapes to Fat Princess and everything in between.

These titles – aside from a few notable exceptions like perhaps LEGO Horizon Adventures and Sackboy: A Big Adventure – have been effectively removed from PlayStation’s portfolio. It’s one of the reasons, along with cross-gen releases, why we believe fans have been less satisfied with PS5’s output than previous consoles.

But what has changed?

Well, the most obvious thing is that the cost of games has gone through the roof. A single AAA title from Naughty Dog, like Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, costs hundreds of millions of dollars these days, dramatically eating into the platform holder’s budget.

But these rising costs also apply to the smaller games as well. With higher costs involved across the board, it’s perhaps easier to greenlight guaranteed hits; God of War Ragnarok may have cost many magnitudes more to make than, say, Gravity Rush 2 to make – but it also sold over five million units in a week.

The other big difference is that the indie space has grown immeasurably. In the early days of the PS Store, an average week would see one or two new titles to release; these days you’re looking at 20 to 30 fresh games per day. That’s a lot of competition, and many of these indie games have budgets which rival AA titles; Kena: Bridge of Spirits,