REACTION - Sony Acquiring Housemarque Is A Super Dooper Move
Hermen Hulst dropping dollar.
By Jay Tee
30/06/21
Housemarque have long been one of my favourite developers; Dead Nation is a classic, Alienation is woefully underappreciated, and Returnal is a clear show of intent from a team clearly ready to take that next step. They have essentially been a first party studio for Sony in all but title, having published predominantly on PlayStation for the last several years. I’m refusing to count Angry Birds Trilogy on Xbox 360 on purely moral grounds.
After the false start of Stormdivers, their future seemed a tad uncertain. But this acquisition will bring financial security and the shared resources of a well established first party organisation. With Microsoft making waves with a string of high profile partnerships and purchases, it’s nice to see Sony following suit, and giving players more reasons to get excited about their platform.
Despite the loud moaning of a fanboy minority, exclusives are actually a good thing for the industry. They typically involve a platform holder stumping up the cash to cover development costs for a particular title (which future proofs the dev team and gives them room to breathe), whilst also increasing awareness, discussion, and excitement for the project and its associated hardware (not to mention giving them the opportunity to leverage platform specific features). I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what they’re cooking.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
