Sony will keep acquiring game studios to sustain "virtuous cycle" of success

Sony Interactive Entertainment boss Jim Ryan says the PlayStation maker will continue acquiring game studios to bolster its first-party credentials.

During the latest episode of the PlayStation podcast (via VGC), Ryan suggested the company's proactive approach to M&As will create a "virtuous cycle where success begets success."

"We’re in a really good place with PlayStation Studios and have been for the past few years. The critical success and the commercial success of the games that they’ve been making has given us permission to invest heavily in content creation," commented Ryan.

"We’re growing our studios organically and we’re growing through acquisition. We acquired five studios during the course of 2021, we're in discussions with Bungie and we have more planned. This is getting us into a virtuous cycle where success begets success."

Those deals include the purchase of Demon's Souls developer Bluepoint Games, Returnal maker Housemarque, and God of War support studio Valkyrie Entertainment. PlayStation also nabbed PC port specialist Nixxes Software and The Persistence VR maker Firesprite, and earlier this year agreed to buy Destiny creator Bungie for $3.6 billion.

Ryan was speaking shortly after Sony announced it will be relaunching PlayStation Plus to create something that feels very similar to Xbox Game Pass.

The revamped service will grant Premium subscribers access to over 700 titles including some first-party content, but unlike Xbox Game Pass won't include day one access to all first-party titles.