Sony announced Tuesday that all games produced or developed in-house by the company will be under their umbrella brand, PlayStation Studios, GameStop reports.
Sony revealed the opening animation for PlayStation Studios, which you can check out up top, and people were quick to realize just how much it looked like the Marvel Studios title card.
Eric Lempel, senior vice president and head of global marketing at Sony Interactive Entertainment, cops to similarities, claiming that as "huge Marvel fans," they wanted to do something that united everything associated with PlayStation in this presentation.
"What we really wanted to do was create a way to bring the consumer into the world," Lempel said, per gamesindustry.biz. "When they play our games that's the nice robust piece that happens, and then you're transported into an adventure with rich worlds, old characters, and really captivating stories. We're all huge Marvel fans. One of our biggest games of all time has a Marvel character in it with Spider-Man. But this is really about doing something specific for our games and our industry."
Lempel envisions that when these franchises expand, the animations will change to represent the game's changes over time. It doesn't, however, explain why Sony borrowed heavily from the Xbox Game Studios' opening animation because if you're going to low-key pull from the design of their Xbox controller, then why not high-key take their new title card, amirite?
Anyway, enough about title cards. Let's get down to why we’re here in the first place: PlayStation Studios. This announcement is meant to put people on notice as to what exclusive games fall under their brand. Sony owns development studios, like Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us), and Santa Monica Studio (God of War), which have characters featured in their new opening animation, but people may not be aware of that fact.
"Over the last few years -- and even the last decade -- the strength of the titles coming out from our studios has been stronger than ever," Lempel said, per IGN. "We have been thinking about how we unite all of these great games under one brand, and really the purpose of that is to make the consumer understand that, when they see this brand, they're getting ready for a robust, innovative, deep experience that they've come to expect from games coming from PlayStation. So we came up with PlayStation Studios."
Sony is expanding its PlayStation Studios brand to include PC gaming, and third-party developers. "If our studios are managing the production of these games and working with an external developer, it will still come out under the PlayStation Studios brand," Lempel explains. "It doesn't mean that we outright own the developer, but it just means we brought it up as a first-party. In a lot of cases we don't own the developer."
The PlayStation Studios brand will launch alongside the release of the PlayStation 5, which isn't coming out in October as some speculated.
