London Studio is a perhaps overlooked, but definitely vital part of Sony's Worldwide Studios group. Over the years it's made games such as The Getaway, the EyeToy series, the Singstar series, Wonderbook, and PSVR Worlds. The developer is about to release Blood & Truth, the spiritual successor to PSVR Worlds' London Heist mini-game, and it says it's happy to be one of the studios at the forefront of Sony's development group.
"I think we've created a niche for ourselves in [that] we are innovators," the studio's senior principal designer, Simon Hermitage, told GameSpot. "We will take hardware and do the difficult legwork to prove that thing can work.
"That relationship goes both ways. When we get a new bit of hardware, we get to feed into its development. It's the reason why I work at London Studio, I love that side of things. It is a speciality of London Studio."
He adds: "As a first-party studio, our job is to grow that [PSVR] market. You can't look at the numbers and go, 'They're small because we just released this [for PSVR rather than for non-VR PS4 owners].' PSVR has grown consistently, and titles like Blood & Truth are so important to invest in and make so that people can see, 'Wow, that's what VR is.'"
On Blood & Truth, Hermitage claims it's the ideal next step for PSVR. "We've brought the triple-A game quality and polish--we knew that was what VR needed next: a full, feature-length, amazing blockbuster game. That's what Blood & Truth is."
Finally, when looking to the future, Hermitage is excited by the possibilities future technology will offer developers. "I was excited, as everyone was, to read [lead system architect] Mark Cerny's article with Wired, and the potential of that system means I'll be sticking around here to get my hands on that as soon as possible. We'll do what we always do: push that as hard as it can possibly go."
Sony has already confirmed that the PS5 will support PSVR, but it refused to comment further on whether it's working on a successor to its existing virtual reality headset. For now, Blood & Truth launches for PSVR on PS4 on May 28.