A new report has shed further light on the decisions taken by Sony to close its AAA VR studio, Sony Manchester five years after its creation.
According to a report published by Polygon, the studio’s closure back in 2020 came off the back of a restructure in key positions of Sony’s hierarchy that triggered a review of the company’s portfolio. Following the appointment of Hermen Hulst as PlayStation’s new head of Worldwide Studios and Shuhei Yoshida’s transition into a new position as head of independent developer initiatives, Sony’s Manchester-based studio reportedly found itself under more scrutiny to show progress with its work, before being closed shortly afterwards.
Founded almost five years prior, Sony Manchester started out as a small development studio poised to create Sony’s next big entry into the VR space. Despite the studio’s secretive development processes and lack of published titles, sources revealed to Polygon that Sony Manchester had been working on a Helicopter-based VR title named CSAR: Combat, Search, and Rescue.
Within the game, players would fly around a map rescuing people from the cockpit of their helicopter whilst gunning down enemies that posed a threat to their mission. Within the cockpit, players would be joined by a co-pilot as they flew between different locales and a central base in the form of an aircraft carrier, which would double up as a mission select hub.
Sony Manchester’s progress on the title was reportedly hindered by a number of aspects. Issues on the game varied from concerns around its art style to gameplay factors based on how the title’s combat and rescue missions would actually work. Multiple former employees told Polygon that a number of the issues surrounding progress on the title were tied to higher-ups within the project.
Overseeing the project was the then-vice president of Sony Worldwide Studios Eric Matthews (who was also a co-founder of Bitmap Brothers) and Sony research director Mark Green. The acting co-lead designers were based 200 miles away in London and would apparently visit the studio roughly once per week.
The former employees pointed to the pair’s apparent micro-management approach to the project, which some staff felt bottlenecked its development. Matthews and Green are also said to have taken a “particularly hands-on” approach during their weekly visits to the studio, during which they would allegedly alter a range of factors on the project and encourage programmers to leave certain elements of the title exposed for further tweaking at a later date, slowing down development repeatedly.
A former employee spoke to Polygon about the problems they felt the studio faced. “Communication was an issue,” said the staff member. “Eric and Mark were not open to it at all. People tried to offer small ideas on how to do the tasks they had on their plates, but [they] often got rejected, unless it was done exactly how they wanted. […] We had a producer but she couldn’t really do her job as they didn’t like any detailed plans. I’m sure that this infinite tweaking and iteration worked fine for the Bitmap Brothers games in the 80s, but it was a bit out of place here. New enemy types would take months — and we’re talking blocky tanks. It was all just a pre-production concept. It was just a graybox for years.”
After a number of staffing changes within the VR studio, Matthews and Green moved its design team to London in the hopes to try and speed up progress on the title. Despite the team allegedly making some late progress on the title, Sony announced in February 2020 that it was closing Sony Manchester. Since then, a number of its members have moved on to work for other studios in the northwest region of England.
In other Sony news, we recently reported that Epic Games offered Sony a fee in the region of $200 million to bring first-party PlayStation titles onto PC. The documents unearthed in a legal battle between Epic Games and Apple noted the Fortnite developer’s offer was made to get Sony to put at least four first-party games to PC.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
