How PlayStation Studios Malaysia is Playing a Growing Role in Sony’s Most Important Franchises

The new Malaysia studio was founded in Kuala Lumpur as a support studio, working closely with PlayStation’s Creative Arts team based in San Diego, and more specifically the Visual Arts team within it. The studio has 77 employees working on creating character models and other visual assets as well as motion capture and more.

“So far it’s a very small contribution,” said Samsudin when asked what work his studio carried out on MLB The Show and The Last of Us. “When we started, the team was very small. A lot of what we are doing is asset development for the games, especially for MLB. For The Last of Us Part I, there was this thing called Death Hints, which are tips that tell the player what to do in certain situations, and (Sony’s) animation team were supposed to be working on them but there was a lot to be done, so that came to us. But now we have a full-fledged art team, so we can do environment modeling, concept art, and we have a brilliant animation team that is working on some games that we can’t talk about right now.”

The Visual Arts team in San Diego also touches every first-party game that comes out of PlayStation, as well as other Sony projects such as aiding CG animation tech for Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots series. Ingram said his team “works on 15 to 25 games at any one time”.

Adding the new Malaysia studio to this equation helps Sony to manage what it calls “global production”, whereby each game is made with the help of hands across the globe. As Ingram put it, “It’s one planet making games”.

“You’re selling these amazing experiences to a global market, so you have to make them in a global market,” Ingram continued.

He cited the VFX and mobile phone industries among others as leading the way in this thinking, stating that the game industry has lagged behind.

Malaysia’s rapid growth as a gaming hub

Elsewhere at Level Up KL, PlayStation’s Malaysia studio held a talk on motion capture, where they detailed some of their processes in that field.

Over the past decade or so, Malaysia has become a prime location for videogame development support. Studios such as Lemon Sky Studios, Passion Republic, Streamline Studios and many more have built up impressive technical knowhow by working with major Western and Japanese studios on series from Street Fighter to Final Fantasy to Destiny to Dark Souls.

The talent pool is growing rapidly, with Kuala Lumpur a city that boasts a high standard of living at a low cost for a rich mix of nationalities and cultures. Along with PlayStation, Bandai Namco, Codemasters and Larian Studios are among the overseas developers to launch studios in Malaysia over the past few years.

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