These cutbacks may impact gamers more than we think, depending what they mean when by "Development Services" when they say they will "focus Sumo Digital exclusively on development services for partners."
This might cut back/eliminate some of the big game spinoffs and franchise work we know of from Sumo.
Sumo's core work over the past few years has been in development support. Their teams have worked on Forza Motorsport/Horizon, Hogwarts Legacy, Halo Infinite, CoD, Fall Guys, Football Manager, LBP, XCOM, PUBG, Age of Empires, Chenobylite, Wildermyth, Exoborne, and many other games. They do everything from porting and art services to co-development, and have several studios in the Sumo Group family dedicated to just nameless contract work behind the scenes. Those services seem to be their focus going forward.
Sumo's full-production development work included games like Team Sonic Racing (and all the Sonic Racing games before it as well as Sega Superstars Tennis), Sackboy, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Warhammer 40k Boltgun, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2, Crackdown 3, and WST Snooker. These are franchise games, but many were commissioned wholly by Sumo as titles they would take on and produce/develop for the publisher for that brand. Depending on who opened the pitch session, if Sumo hadn't gone to the SEGA office and said they could do a kart racer for them, we might not have had the Sonic Racing series. When Gun Interactive was trying to lock down the Texas Chainsaw license and put some feelers out saying, "Hey, who can build this game for us?", Sumo had the open development team that could make that happen. Sumo came in and rescued Blaloodlines 2 and Crackdown 3 (for better or worse) to develop them anew after the original teams failed to produce a viable game release.
So it depends on the extent of this statement whether contract/commission work is included. They say, "Whether collaborating on new or established games, co-developing games, providing specialist engineering, or porting services; we are confident in our teams’ exceptional talent and our ability to thrive in this next chapter." That could mean collaborating with publishers on Sumo's own new games, or it could mean only collaborating with developers on their new games.
Sumo is unfortunately not the hot hand workhorse it was in the PS3/360 (their Sonic/Outrun racers for SEGA were probably the studio's high point,) I don't know if anything great for a major brand was going to come out of their original factory system again. (It's been four years since Sackboy and the core Sumo Digital offices have not produced a game that notable since.) However, I do hope this isn't the last time we see Sumo Digital on the developer label for a new game, their name on a title was enough for me to give a game a look.
www.videogameschronicle.com
. Even the one game they cited as original I’ve never heard of. So yeah.
