Sony acquired another new company today, although not one you may have heard of. In a tweet, the head of PlayStation Studios, Hermen Hulst, announced that Dutch studio Nixxes Software will be joining PlayStation Studios. The company lives in relative obscurity because it hasn’t actually made any games itself. Instead, Nixxes specializes in, according to its About Us page, “video game design, development, and porting,” with a big focus on that last part. Nixxes has played a role in various platform ports of multiple games, including Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider, and Deux Ex: Mankind Divided, each of which it helped port to PC. The studio also played a role in converting Rise of the Tomb Raider to Xbox One X and is involved with Marvel’s Avengers, although it doesn’t say in what capacity.
Sony acquiring a studio known for its PC ports leads to some pretty interesting assumptions. The tech giant has already made it clear that it intends to bring more PlayStation games to PC, with Horizon: Zero Dawn and Days Gone already making their way over to the platform. However, acquiring an entire studio that specializes in that task is a large investment and points toward a greater push from Sony to get its games on PC, perhaps even faster. Horizon Zero Dawn hit PCs in August 2020, over three years after its original release date in February 2017. Likewise, Days Gone launched on PC in May, just over two years after it first hit the PlayStation 4 in April 2019.
Sony’s purchase of Nixxes comes just days after it acquired Returnal developer Housemarque. “Housemarque’s recent release of Returnal proves the studio is one with incredible vision, capable of creating memorable new games that resonate with our community,” said Hulst. Sony is not giving up on single-player games despite investing a lot into live-service games over the past few years, with plans to release at least one “major” single-player game every year “from next fiscal year onwards.”
The company released its Q2 2024 financial report on Friday, and there was a lot of good news for the video game division despite the high-profile failure of live-service title Concord. Earlier this year. The hero shooter only wracked up a few hundred players on Steam at launch — only 697 concurrent users at peak, according to SteamDB. Sony Interactive Entertainment took the game offline two weeks after launch before eventually sunsetting it and shutting down developer Firewalk Studios.
People have a lot of questions about the PlayStation 5 Pro ahead of its launch on November 7. Is it worth $700? How much better will your games look and play? Will your PS5 Slim faceplate match? You’ll have to wait for reviews to answer a lot of those questions, but we now have an answer to that last one. Digital Trends can confirm that PS5 Slim covers won’t work with the PS5 Pro. “PS5 console covers are not compatible with PS5 Pro. However, players will be able to swap out different console covers for PS5 Pro when they become available in the future,” a PlayStation spokesperson told IGN Thursday.
Sony announced that it’s officially sunsetting Concord and closing its developer Firewalk Studios after a disastrous launch that led to it taking the game offline after just two weeks. Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), which acquired Firewalk in 2023, revealed in an email sent out to employees on Tuesday that it’s shutting down the studio, along with mobile developer Neon Koi, in order to “strengthen SIE’s Studio Business.” That means two studios acquired by Sony over the past two years have been closed.
