Sony closes development studio that made Driveclub and Motorstorm games

Sony has closed Evolution Studios. The game studio made the WRC games, the Motorstorm series and most recently Driveclub for the PlayStation 4. Last week the studio showed a demo of Driveclub VR during the Game Developer Conference.

Sony said in a statement that it regularly looks at how “all resources in the highly competitive landscape can be harnessed to deliver high-quality, commercially viable projects.” As a result of this process, Sony has decided to close Evolution Studios. Sony says it is making an effort to put as many developers as possible on other projects, but the company is also aware that it will likely lose talented developers as a result of the decision.

Evolution’s most recent game is Driveclub, which was supposed to be a PlayStation 4 launch title. In the end, the racing game only came on the market a year later, because the game was far from finished by the intended deadline. Even at release, the game still had a lot of problems around the servers.

Driveclub was probably not the success that was hoped for Sony. An expansion with engines was released in October. It is striking that Evolution last week during the GDC in San Francisco another demo showed of Driveclub VR for the PlayStation VR. It is not clear what the status of that project is. Jamie Brayshaw, Evolution’s community manager, lets know that ‘Driveclub will live on under the care of the great PlayStation team’.

British based Evolution Studios was founded in 1999 and was the creator of the World Rally Championship games for seven years. In 2006 the studio came up with Motorstorm as the launch title for the PlayStation 3. A number of successors appeared within this series. In 2007, the studio became part of Sony Computer Entertainment.