Former PlayStation boss Shawn Layden has been away from the company for five years now, but he's still got plenty to say about how things are going in Sony's gaming division. And in a recent interview at Gamescom Asia conducted by IGN Japan , he reflected on the 2021 reorganization and subsequent mass exodus of talent from Sony Japan Studio , giving a bit of context as to why he thinks the dissolution happened in the first place. The remnants of Japan Studio were recentered around Astrobot developer Team Asobi , which later that year was moved into PlayStation Studios.
Though Layden was not involved in any of the aforementioned decisions, having departed Sony in 2019, he still had thoughts on why the studio was effectively disbanded. "That was sad," he said. "It wasn't necessarily a surprise.
I love Allan [Becker, former head of Japan Studio], and he worked really hard, but there was so much legacy malaise. It's tough when a studio hasn't had a hit for a while, then they forget how that feels. You know, if you have a hit once it's it's like a drug, man, you're chasing the next one, right? And then if you don't have that for a while, you forget what it felt like, and then you start to forget how to get there.
"There were probably two roads. One was the road they took. The other road was a real tough-love program.
And maybe that's what the Team Asobi thing is. It's like pruning a bonsai, right? You get it back down to its nub and see if you can grow back out again." Layden is r.