Ben Lindbergh

And somewhat unceremoniously, last week, Sony announced that it will be shutting down Bluepoint.

And this is just the latest in a string of disasters that have befallen studios that have been acquired by Sony in a bit of an expansion spree in the post-pandemic craze.

Matt, what did you make of the decision to shut down Bluepoint Games?

And the reason that I think this provoked such shock and also disdain, not just the fact that Bluepoint has been shut down, that a lot of people like the games they worked on, that 70 people were laid off or about to be as a result of this, but

Also that, well, we've described them as remaster specialists, but they were miscast after being acquired.

And that's, I think, the part that's so flummoxing is that you acquire Bluepoint Games who have this specialty.

They've done this one thing and they've done it extremely well.

And then you task them with doing something completely different, which is reportedly a live service God of War game.

And that got canceled.

And that probably led to the closure of Bluepoint.

And so you have asked them to do something that they've never done before that they presumably weren't the greatest fit for.

It's very much like you take Rocksteady, which has distinguished itself with the Arkham games, and then you say, make us a live service game.

And granted, they played a part in that decision too, but that's not really in the studio's DNA.

And so I think that's the frustrating thing here, really, is that

You see the statement from PlayStation executive Herman Holst, and he's talking about all the challenges, all the headwinds in the industry.

We're operating in an increasingly challenging industry environment, rising development costs, slowed industry growth, changing player behavior, broader economic headwinds, etc., etc.,

Sure, that's all true, but it's hard to say the industry made us do it.

When you chose to reassign this specialist studio to something that it most likely was not suited for, then you canceled those plans and then you scuttled the studio entirely.

It's hard not to see that as self-inflicted and self-sabotage.

Joshua, what do you think?