Gravity Rush Character Designer the Latest Departure from Sony's Japan Studio

Damn, I thought we gonna get some good news about Japan Studio today.

I love Gravity Rush so much. Such an underrated Playstation exclusive. To see the team who worked on this game leaving left and right hurts so bad. Whatever this overhaul better be worth it since I haven't seen anything positive out of this yet.

P.S. - that illustration of Kat is so cute but dang, this could be the last official artwork of my favorite girl

As someone who loves the Gravity Rush series, it hurts reading this. Sony is making record profits as a company and yet only now do they see fit to let all these talented people go. It's depressing. AND they're losing a studio at a time when Microsoft is acquiring any developer they can get their mitts on.

Anyway, he's a fantastic artist. Good luck to him in the future.

It's really setting in now that we'll never get another Gravity Rush game...

Hopefully he stays in games development. His style of character design is awesome. I'd love to see his work in the future,

I am not crying, your crying.
I am going to miss him, and the rest of the devs.

Kat is such a well designed character. I really should get back to gravity rush 2 at some point .

Sony losing exclusives, studio and focusing on VR gimmicks, sad times indeed

Thats mess up.i love gravity rush games.those games are amazing.its 😥 sad that you mostly likely wont see kat anymore.come on sony.you can do better than that.wheres bluepoint aquisition.and others.word up son

Japan Studio was just too dysfunctional to maintain. Cutting off resources in one place allows expansion in others.

Guerilla Games moved into a new building and expanded to twice the size, and will be a 2 game studio now. A 100% increase in output.

Santa Monica moved into a new building a few years back, and after GOW finally were able to go onto a major recruitment and expand to twice the size and be a 2 game studio.

An entirely new team was created in San Diego to continue Uncharted Series with support from Naughty Dog.

Media Molecule is recruiting and expanding.

Who knows what studios like Sucker Punch and Insomniac are up to internally.

Sony people thinking the sky is falling because of the news they hear. Meanwhile I was reading comments and tweets from the other guys’ fans who are upset over their services and want to jump ship. Grass is always greener I guess. 🤷🏾‍♂️

@Dekutheevilclown What you've just highlighted as positive I thinks shows a negative change in strategy from Sony. Western studios moving into bigger buildings as Japanese studios are shuttered and talented Japanese developers let go. There doesn't seem to be any balance in Sony's approach anymore. West is best apparently.

I adore the Gravity Rush games and it makes me sad to think there'll never be another.

I love both gravity rush games and I really like the games art, I was hoping sony make another games with art like this

@__jamiie I mean, Amy Hennig and Dave Jaffe left Naughty Dog and Sony Santa Monica respectively and that didn’t kill Uncharted and God of War. In fact, I remember similar comments about both occurrences.

I bought a PS Vita just to play Gravity Rush and I loved every second of it. Extremely underrated games, I have both soundtracks and sometimes listen to them when I'm playing other games. I hope all these let go developers find a new home very quickly also RIP to Sony's most adorable and innocent mascot 😟

@AhmadSumadi I'm talking about the shift away from anything that's Japanese and different to a standard western type blockbuster.

I don't even like Gravity Rush and I'm still saddened by this news.

Cue armchair managers with lectures on how SJS was dysfunctional, unprofitable, lame etc. World of their own - but sadly enough, of the current Sony's, too. It's one thing to try optimizing output and resources, and another to be losing versatile veteran talents by the week in the process.

slowing Sony is killing it japanese development divisions, to only focus on it western divisions, i hope this developer found a Publisher where his work is regonized and treated well.

Very sad indeed. Loved both Gravity Rush games.
Sony are slowly losing a lot of the Japanese appeal that PS4 overflowed with...

I really like Saito's art style. I'm glad his Twitter account is active again.

@nhSnork the truth of Japan studio is in the public domain. It was the biggest studio owned by Sony and made very few finished games. There are quotes from management stating that it was a free for all and in 2013 there was something like 30 projects in production. People were literally just doing whatever they wanted, and almost nothing got done.

@Rob_230 Yep. Her character is probably my favourite thing about the game. She's well written and designed in general.

some of the far-fetched comments in this thread about Sony are so ridiculous🤣 they are doing more than fine on the gaming front.

@ThroughTheIris56 Completely agree. The games were ... ok i guess, but her character definitely elevated them

@Rob_230 They are pretty awkward to play for AAA games. However, I think they're solid and very unique.

gravity rush 2 had some of the best art direction i have seen on ps4. loved the character design work. i hope saito finds a new home and continues to work on great games in the future.

GRAVITY RUSH!!! I love those games. 2 of my all time favorites. Hope he joins Bokeh. I'm surprised he hasn't already.

I love Playstation mostly for their japanese exclusives.

What's their strategy with all those closures? To loose to both Xbox and Nintendo?

@Dekutheevilclown which once again brings us back to have a lot more questions for Sony than for the studio itself, but also leaves you wistfully wondering how many more interesting things we could have seen if someone had worked out a proper pipeline for the output.

@Dekutheevilclown It's still not a good look for them to practically get rid of their japanense studios with them being a japanese corporation.
From a business perspective it does make sense to throw support at the successful studios but you lose a lot of the quirkiness: no parappa the rapper, no locoRoco, no Patapon, no Gravity Rush, no Ico, Ape Escape, and we can keep going. I had read another article that closing Japan Studios was a bad decision that Sony probably WAS NOT going to regret because of the same points you make, and I'm beginning to agree.

So strange that with Microsoft growing fast, Sony is down sizing so much. You'd think they'd have just split Team ASOBI into its own studio while keeping Japan. But w.e let's hope this doesn't end up like PS3 era Sony