Sony Interactive Entertainment: Developers tell the Fall of Manchester VR Studio

In February 2020, the manufacturer and publisher announced without shouting Garela closing his studio of Manchester, not without dismissing the whole team who worked for several years on a virtual reality AAA intended to stay in the limbo of the industry.

18 months after this decision to improve the operational efficiency of the company, the ex decided to set up, and to tell the underside of this funny adventure to our colleagues of Polygon.

Stationary flight

If concrete NDAs contractually prevent the old developers to reveal the nature of the project on which they worked, the game had to propel the players to the controls of a helicopter, alternating between pain phases and first aid. But decisions. Floating from their management did not help to advance the project:

The studio worked on a version of the game for 6 to 12 months, before a sudden change dropped the team. The problems were about the artistic direction concerns, judged too blue, the placement of NPCs and how the missions would take place.

According to the small hands, the representatives of Sony Eric Matthews, then Vice President of Sony Worldwide Studios and Mark Green, Director of Research, would have despite their absence to get involved in all the choices of development.

Enthusiastic new recruits would soon be disadvantaged by discovering these relatively short-framework working methods, which still had to obtain the continued downstream of the headquarters in London: **

Communication was a problem. Eric and Mark were not open at all. Some have tried to offer their ideas on how to perform their tasks, but everything was rejected in block. Integrate a new type of enemy took months - and we are talking about simple tanks. For years, we were in a kind of gray zone.

Saved by the Bell 47

While the months pass and that the site stagnates again and again, several members of the team present since the opening of the studio in 2015 throw the sponge, but are not necessarily replaced , which does not arrange Obviously nothing in the case:

On the paper, it seems amazing: we would create a new license on behalf of Sony, starting with nothing. But after six months to a year, people realized that it did not lend anywhere and had to make a decision on what they were going to do after.

The great game of musical chairs that propels the Ex-Guerilla Games Hermen Hulst at the head of the PlayStation Worldwide Studios tightens the vise around Sie Manchester, now summoned to justify his work, evidence in support.

The continuation is sadly known:

From the outside, it was a little steep. There has been a change on the side of the management at Sony, and we suddenly found ourselves without protection. Someone decided to look in detail what was happening at home, and we had nothing tangible after more or less five years of work ... they closed the studio.

Polygon specifies all as well as the developers surveyed do not hold the builder, and ensure that their virtual reality helicopter game project will never be taken again by any structure than this self. This is called planting the last nail in the coffin, is not it?