Sony announced that it is acquiring mobile developer Savage Game Studios. Compared to recent game industry acquisitions like Sony’s purchase of Destiny 2 developer Bungie and Microsoft’s buy of US-based publisher Activision Blizzard, this merger is more low-profile. Savage Game Studios was founded in 2020 and has not yet launched a game. In 2021 it raised funding for to open in Helsinki, Finland and Berlin, Germany, to work on a “AAA mobile live service action game”. The blog post trumpeting the announcement said that it’s still too early to say more about that project, but work on it continues.
As for the role of Savage Game Studios in the new PlayStation Studios ecosystem, founder and CEO Michail Katkoff said positive things about Sony’s respect for Savage’s creative vision. Hermen Hulst, Head of PlayStation Studios, promised that the addition of Savage to the roster would be “similarly additive” to its efforts to release games on PS4, PS5, PS VR 2, and PC. Savage will join a newly created Mobile Division at PlayStation Studios, operating independently from the console development arm. It’ll focus on “innovative, on-the-go experiences based on new and existing PlayStation IP.”
In other words, Savage Game Studios could be behind, among other things, a future mobile-focused spin-off or port of an existing PlayStation IP. Since axing its original PlayStation Mobile service in 2015, PlayStation has been pretty much absent from mobile gaming. Perhaps with this and future acquisitions, a God of War, Horizon, or Uncharted mobile game could be revealed in the next few years.
