PlayStation shutting down Concrete Genie developer PixelOpus

It’s been a rough period of layoffs and closures over the past several months, and that trend seems to unfortunately be continuing. 

PixelOpus, the small PlayStation Studios team in California, is shutting down, as shared by the studio’s Twitter account on Friday.

“Dear friends, our PixelOpus adventure has come to an end. As we look to new futures, we wanted to say a heartfelt thank you to the millions of passionate players who have supported us, and our mission to make beautiful, imaginative games with heart. We are so grateful!”

PixelOpus was founded in 2014 as a kind of experimental studio, with students from a game development program hosted by Sony being joined by a couple of veteran developers to work as a smaller-scale studio. The team released Entwined for the PS3, PS4, and PlayStation Vita that same year. Entwined saw mixed-to-poor reviews, with critics adding that the game had great artistic merit. 

In 2019, PixelOpus released Concrete Genie, a more ambitious title that saw more positive reviews, starring a child protagonist whose drawings on walls came to life. Some reviews of Concrete Genie praised its family-friendly quality, while noting repetitive gameplay elements and other areas of possible improvement. 

Over the last couple of years, PixelOpus had been quietly hiring while never growing massively, with job listings indicating that the team was working on an Unreal Engine 5 game with support from Sony Animation Pictures. This description sparked plenty of theorycrafting that the game would be a tie-in to some kind of Sony animated film, with possibilities including a game connected to the critically-acclaimed Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. “I like to think that with #ConcreteGenie - we made the world an ever-so-slightly better place... and not too many games these days have the chance to try and do that,” said Bob Archibald, senior staff environment artist on PixelOpus (via Twitter). “I will always be grateful for my time building imaginative worlds with this incredible team.”

This closure comes amid a buying spree across Sony and other gaming publishers, with PlayStation Studios expanding to include Savage Game Studios and Firewalk Studios in the past year. 

Right now, PlayStation Studios continues its focus on large-scale, blockbuster AAA games such as Sony Santa Monica’s God of War Ragnarok and the upcoming Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 from Insomniac Games. PlayStation is also preparing for a massive push into ongoing live-service games, with the aforementioned Firewalk Studios currently working on a first-person shooter for PlayStation 5 and PC. Other studios working on live-service or multiplayer games at PlayStation include Naughty Dog and Haven Games, while Bungie — which was acquired by Sony and is assisting PlayStation Studios, but is remaining a separate multiplatform developer and publisher — is also working on new titles outside of the ongoing juggernaut that is Destiny 2.

With the closure of PixelOpus, PlayStation seems increasingly to be avoiding any interest in smaller-scale games from smaller-scale teams.