Sony Acquires Firesprite, Teases A New Project

PlaySta­tion has acquired anoth­er game stu­dio, with PlaySta­tion Stu­dios boss Her­man Hulst announc­ing Wednes­day that Fire­sprite will be join­ing the group.

Fire­sprite is the 14th mem­ber to join PlaySta­tion Stu­dios, and is the third stu­dio that Sony has acquired just this year. This is fol­low­ing the buy­out of Retur­nal devel­op­er House­mar­que and PC port spe­cial­ist Nixxes Soft­ware.

“I could­n’t be more delight­ed to wel­come Fire­sprite to the PlaySta­tion Stu­dios fam­i­ly as our 14th stu­dio! Quite a few mem­bers of Fire­sprite come from SIE’s Stu­dio Liv­er­pool and we’re thrilled to wel­come them back,” Hulst stat­ed in a blog post.

SIE Stu­dio Liv­er­pool was pre­vi­ous­ly closed, and Fire­sprite is result of that clo­sure. This makes it a re-acquisition. 

“Fire­sprite is a cre­ative and ambi­tious stu­dio that is excep­tion­al at build­ing incred­i­ble expe­ri­ences that tru­ly show­case the poten­tial of our hard­ware,” Hulst said. “The team’s tech­ni­cal and cre­ative capa­bil­i­ties will be para­mount to grow­ing our stel­lar cat­a­logue of exclu­sive games, and I think you’ll be excit­ed for what’s to come.”

The terms of the acqui­si­tion were not disclosed.

“Today is an incred­i­bly excit­ing day for Fire­sprite as we join PlaySta­tion Stu­dios with the back­ing of Her­men and the entire PlaySta­tion Fam­i­ly. We are very much look­ing for­ward to the next part of our jour­ney!” Fire­sprite’s man­ag­ing direc­tor Graeme Ankers said.

“PlaySta­tion also gave us the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate our own IP, The Per­sis­tence, and we were giv­en the cre­ative free­dom to explore, inno­vate, and release a sur­vival hor­ror game we are immense­ly proud of. Now, as a first par­ty stu­dio, we know we have the full sup­port of PlaySta­tion in fur­ther­ing our her­itage of com­bin­ing cre­ativ­i­ty and tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion to offer some tru­ly unique expe­ri­ences for PlaySta­tion fans.”

“We can’t wait to show you what we have been work­ing on……we’re just get­ting started!”

Fire­sprite has 250 employ­ees, accord­ing to GamesIndustry.biz. This is a con­sid­er­able amount of work­force. “What I real­ly like, is that Fire­sprite has grown so much. It is now a sub­stan­tial devel­op­er of over 250 peo­ple,” Hulst told the site. “They’ve real­ly estab­lished an entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it as an inde­pen­dent team. They’re very exper­i­men­tal in their approach to game devel­op­ment. I think the com­bi­na­tion of that lega­cy, and that entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it… that’s a great foun­da­tion for us to col­lab­o­rate on the few great exclu­sive game projects that we’re work­ing on together.”

The announce­ment of this acqui­si­tion comes just one day before Sony’s major PS5 show­case event, thought it’s not clear if any projects from Fire­sprite will be shown off dur­ing the streamed event.