Ahead of the PlayStation 5 launch, Sony is rebranding its first-party developers and uniting its exclusives under the PlayStation Studios banner.
PlayStation Studios will replace the previously used name of Sony Interactive Entertainment Worldwide Studios. To commemorate the new branding, Sony released a 17-second opening animation that will appear after booting up its internally developed titles. Several critically acclaimed Sony franchises pop up during the opening including God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, LittleBigPlanet, Ratchet and Clank, The Last of Us, and Uncharted.
The new branding won’t just be on games by Sony’s internal developers, such as Naughty Dog, Insomniac, and Guerrilla Games. It will also include titles by third-party developers that Sony produces and publishes.
Beyond the opening animation, players can see the PlayStation Studios branding on game discs and boxes. Trailers and other advertisements will have shorter versions of the opening. Sony wants the logo to be synonymous with its first-party quality as it has released some of the most critically and commercially successful games over the past decade.
The PlayStation Studios branding will be ready for the launch of the PS5 later this year, though some high-profile summer releases, The Last of Us: Part II, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Horizon Zero Dawn on PC, will still carry the older Sony Interactive Entertainment opening. Still, it’s not a PS5-exclusive change, as future PlayStation 4 titles will reflect the rebranding along with any of Sony’s PC releases.
“The strength of the titles coming out from our studios has been stronger than ever,” Sony head of global marketing Eric Lempel told GameIndustry.biz. “We have been thinking about how we unite all of these great games under one brand, and really the purpose of that is to make the consumer understand that, when they see this brand, they’re getting ready for a robust, innovative, deep experience that they’ve come to expect from games coming from PlayStation. So we came up with PlayStation Studios.”
Lempel is excited about introducing variants of the opening animation in the future to reflect new franchises and to create specific ones that celebrate long-running series. He believes that consumers were previously confused as to what games actually came from Worldwide Studios, and this rebranding will help players find Sony’s exclusive offerings on PS5 and beyond.
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