PlayStation is planning a “virtuous cycle” of more studio acquisitions

The PlayStation Studios brand is growing. Most recently, Sony moved to acquire Bungie for $3.6 billion. Over the past year, other big names like Bluepoint Games (Demon’s Souls remake), Housemarque (Returnal), and Firesprite (The Persistence) have come under the PlayStation umbrella, and that trend isn’t stopping any time soon.

Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan appeared on the most recent episode of the Official PlayStation Podcast, where he was asked about the PS Plus / PS Now combination and more. The topic of studio acquisitions came up, and Ryan says it’s thanks to first-party hits like Horizon Forbidden West that Sony can invest in other teams. “The critical success and commercial success of the games that [we’ve] been making has given us permission to invest heavily in content creation,” he said. “We’re in discussions with Bungie, and we have more planned. This is getting us into a virtuous cycle where success begets success.”

This isn’t the first time Ryan has used the phrase “virtuous cycle.” In fact, it was on the heels of the aforementioned merger of PS Plus and PS Now where he said it most recently. The service will not offer new PlayStation games on day one, and Ryan believes those games would suffer if it did. “[Sony is] in a good virtuous cycle with the studios where investment delivers success, which enables yet more investment,” he said at the time. According to Ryan, this cycle would be broken by games being offered on launch day, because it would have a “knock-on effect on the quality” of those titles.