Sony is fresh to the fighting game world. PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale isn’t quite a month old and while the game hasn’t lit sales charts on fire, reviews for the mascot brawler have been largely favorable. The fighting game market is a brutal one populated almost exclusively by entrenched franchises like Street Fighter with decades of history so it was bold of Sony to even attempt to enter the fray. It appears that Sony is already learning the fighting game ropes too: The secret to success is sequels.
SuperBot Entertainment, the studio that worked alongside Sony Santa Monica to make PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, is bucking the trend of studio staffing. The way the industry typically works today is to liquidate staff after a game ships. Not only is SuperBot not laying people off, it’s hiring new people to work on what appears to be PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale 2.
SuperBot is hiring both a game designer and an art director at the moment. The game designer is required to have some very specific skills. In particular, they need “knowledge of fighting games, their systems and mechanics a serious plus” as well as a “near encyclopedic knowledge of modern gamers, with emphasis on PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.”
Those skills aren’t listed on the ad for the art director position, but it does openly suggest that the artist will work on a new entry in the series. “A project such as PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, which by definition brings together elements ranging from an incredibly wide range of artistic styles, requires a strong and unifying vision to present a cohesive and polished product,” reads the ad.
SuperBot may not be preparing a straight sequel to PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. It’s also common to release iterations of fighting games. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 for example was followed by Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
Sony’s game could certainly use a sales boost. Microsoft brought Halo 4 to the holiday 2012 fight and Nintendo rolled out not one but two games in its best-selling platformer series, New Super Mario Bros. 2 and New Super Mario Bros. U. That’s some major franchise power on the consoles. Sony, on the other hand, mostly sat out the season. It’s only major release was PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, a fighting game starring characters from the company’s own diverse pantheon of properties as well as a number of characters from other publishers that got their start with Sony like Metal Gear Solid’s Raiden and Devil May Cry’s Dante. According to sales tracker VGChartz, whose data is compiled based on retailer contacts, Sony has sold just 170,000 copies of the game so far.
Source: NeoGAF
