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According to Hermen Hulst, a Guerrilla cofounder whom Jim Ryan tapped to lead PlayStation Studios in 2019, the group has more than 25 titles in development for the PS5—nearly half of which are entirely new IP. “There’s an incredible amount of variety originating from different regions,” Hulst says. “Big, small, different genres.”

And in many of those cases, Sony’s shared services became a lifeline for studios navigating lockdown. Having moved all its employees home in early 2020, Guerilla Games found itself staring down the barrel of a game that hadn’t even finished its voice and performance capture, let alone play-testing. For the audio, Guerrilla shipped recording booths to the voice actors’ homes. Performance capture was tougher, since it couldn’t use its usual facilities in California, but last summer the studio moved into a new Amsterdam space they’d designed to have a motion-capture stage; that, plus some very careful hygiene, allowed them to get what they needed. And the play-testing? Well, it’s a good thing Sony had invested in cloud gaming for its streaming service PlayStation Now. “Seeing that first play test using PlayStation was a huge relief,” says Smets. “Knowing that, ‘OK, great, we can continue.’”

Indies are getting in on the fun too. Haven Studios, a new venture from industry veteran Jade Raymond, has partnered with Sony for its next game, as has Firewalk Studios for an unannounced multiplayer title. Ember Lab, an animation and digital studio, is releasing its first major game, the Zelda-esque Kena: Bridge of Spirits, in August; while the game began its life as a PS4 title, Sony encouraged cofounders (and brothers) Josh and Mike Grier to make it available on both. Now, the pair is excited not just about what they’ve been able to do with the added horsepower—more characters onscreen, 3D audio, using the haptics to make the protagonist’s bow and arrow feel as lifelike as possible—but what they’ve learned for when it comes time to make their next title. “Our groundwork was on the PS4,” says Josh Grier. “But looking at game two, focusing on taking advantage of the SSD and building mechanics and tools around that, will be really fun. I know for sure we haven't fully taken advantage of how actually fast it is—we were getting a lot of benefits of it being just out-of-the-box better. But I think you can push it even more.”
The PS5 Is Starting to Look Like the Revolution It Promised | WIRED