According to the rumor mill, Sony has continued to make studio acquisitions, including the potential acquisition of another one recently. A few days ago, a Reddit user claimed to have had evidence of the subsequent acquisition that Sony made and chose to keep quiet about.
Given Sony's recent spats with Microsoft over the Activision Blizzard acquisition debacle, it comes as little surprise that Sony might want to keep any potential acquisitions of its own in the dark as much as possible, only to announce them when the time is right. With sales and production of the PS5 ramping up going into the rest of the 2023 fiscal year, Sony is hoping to keep the momentum going. With its acquisition of Bungie making waves in 2022, Sony looks to keep the trend of acquisitions going in the future, including the potential acquisition of developers based in different parts of the world.
According to the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit, a user named Lachschok claimed that Sony potentially acquired, or is in the process of buying out, the UK-based Ballistic Moon based on some job listings that were pointed out by the PlayStation Studios Fans Twitter feed. Lachschok's post received over 200 upvotes within four days. However, at the time of writing, the job listings for Ballistic Moon have been removed from the link Lachschok posted, which led other Redditors to comment and theorize about what possibly happened. Either Sony's acquisition of Ballistic Moon is not a thing and the job posting was made in error, or Sony is choosing to keep the news out of the spotlight for now. Alternatively, Ballistic Moon may be less of an acquisition and more of a partnership with Sony, in a similar vein as studios such as Kojima Productions.
Ballistic Moon is based in South East England and was founded in 2019 by former Supermassive Games staff that worked on games such as Until Dawn and Heavy Rain. Supermassive Games was acquired by Nordisk Games last year. While no games have been publicly announced at the time of writing, job listings and Twitter posts by the company (@ballistic_moon) have mentioned working in Unreal Engine 5 on projects in early development. If the acquisition rumors turn out to be true, this means the studio could be working with Sony as a first-party or second-party developer, or in a supportive role depending on the projects.
In the meantime, PS5 owners will have something more tangible to look forward to in the coming weeks. With the imminent launch of the PlayStation VR2 headset and plenty of titles to come throughout 2023, only time will tell if Ballistic Moon's upcoming project will be under Sony's umbrella or not.
Source: Reddit
