London Studio

» see sonyinteractive.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

London Studio was assembled rather than founded. In 2002 Sony merged SCEE Studio Camden, which had come into the company inside the Psygnosis purchase, with Team Soho, the team that had just shipped The Getaway. The new studio took the name of the city and kept it for twenty two years, which is longer than most of the first-party studios that got more attention.

What it actually did was sell hardware. The EyeToy camera and the SingStar microphones were Sony peripherals, and London Studio built the software that justified buying them. That is a less glamorous brief than a flagship shooter and it worked better than one: SingStar passed twenty million copies inside six years, and the studio shipped more than sixty titles across its life. When PlayStation VR arrived the same logic applied again, and London Studio made VR Worlds for the launch and then Blood & Truth, which in May 2019 became the first VR game to reach number one on the UK retail chart.

Sony announced the proposed closure in February 2024, inside a round that cut about 900 jobs across PlayStation. The studio stayed open through the consultation period and posted a farewell note on 21 May 2024 thanking past and present players. The live-service game it had been building since at least 2022, a co-op title set in a fantasy London, was cancelled with it.

~ the case file ~

~ twenty million karaoke discs ~

SingStar worked because it shipped a physical object and a music license together. Each regional release needed its own catalog cleared with the labels for that territory, which is why the SingStar disc you could buy depended entirely on which country's shelf you were standing in front of. Sony built out localized song packs for the UK, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, Germany. Turkey got none of them, and the peripheral itself was never pushed at Turkish retail in any serious way, so the game arrived here as a thing you saw on a television show about somewhere else. To play it at all you needed the microphones plus the one disc carrying songs the room already knew, and the second of those was decided in a licensing office in another country.

The service side of SingStar outlived the studio's peak by years. The SingStore kept selling tracks into the PS4 era and the whole thing was finally switched off before the studio was.

~ the two games nobody got to play ~

London Studio has an unusual amount of cancelled work in its record. Around 2008 Sony Europe killed both Eight Days and a Getaway sequel, two PlayStation 3 exclusives that were far enough along to have been shown publicly, and moved the resources to other first-party titles. The studio went back to peripherals and then to VR.

The fantasy London live-service project was the second time the same thing happened, except that this time the studio went with it. Four years of work, no shipped product, and a codename most people outside the building never learned.

~ what closed with it ~

The Getaway's version of London was built from photographs of about fifty square miles of real streets, years before open-world city games were routine, and nobody owns a reason to revisit it. SingStar's catalog is a licensing problem rather than a rights problem, which is a different kind of dead: the code is fine and the songs are not clearable twice. EyeToy has been unusable since the PS2 generation ended.

Twenty two years of a studio whose main product was a reason to buy an accessory, and the accessories all stopped working first.

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