Brotaku

Hermen Hulst, head of PlayStation Studios, has confirmed that Sony Interactive Entertainment are investing in the Japanese branch of XDEV, the team that collaborated with From Software on Bloodborne and Kojima Productions on Death Stranding. Hulst also addressed claims that PlayStation was abandoning its Japanese heritage by reaffirming that Japanese games are still important to Sony Interactive Entertainment and that the company is still a Japanese company “in some ways”. XDEV were also recruiting for a senior producer, producer and technical producer to work on a new AAA project in Japan.

Here’s what Hulst had to say:

I will say that we are in some ways very much a Japanese company still,” Hulst said. “That’s our heritage. That’s still part of who we are. We love our Japanese games. We’re building out Team ASOBI under Nicolas Doucet, so we’re actually investing in that team. People forget sometimes that we have Polyphony Digital, which is a team in two locations. We are investing in our external development group out of Tokyo as well, and that’s a team that has obviously worked with the likes of FromSoftware and Kojima Productions. So we are very invested in Japanese development, and Japanese development is something that we love… I think it’s such a core part of the PlayStation identity, that I can’t ever see us shy away from Japanese or even Asian development.