London Studio

London Studio
Information
Industry	Video games
Founded	2002
Headquarters	Soho, London, United Kingdom
Notable Personnel	Mike Haigh (studio director, 2008), Dave Ranyard (studio head, 2014), Stuart Whyte and Tara Saunders (co-studio heads, 2022)
Products	EyeToy, SingStar, Wonderbook: Book of Spells, PlayStation VR Worlds, Blood & Truth
Parent	Sony Interactive Entertainment (formerly Sony Computer Entertainment)

London Studio (also SCE London Studio, later PlayStation London Studio) was a first-party video game developer owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment and based in Soho, London. Sony formed it in 2002 by merging its Camden studio, which had come from Psygnosis, with Team Soho, the developer of The Getaway. The studio was best known for camera and microphone games such as EyeToy: Play and SingStar, and it later made the augmented reality title Wonderbook: Book of Spells.

For virtual reality, London Studio built one of the first-party demos shown at the announcement of Sony's Project Morpheus headset at GDC 2014, then developed the PlayStation VR launch title PlayStation VR Worlds (2016) and the full-length shooter Blood & Truth (2019). In October 2022 the studio said its next project was a non-VR online co-op combat game for PlayStation 5. On 27 February 2024 Sony announced a plan, subject to consultation, to close London Studio in its entirety as part of a cut of about 900 jobs, and the studio closed in May 2024.

Reviewed 13 October 2026. Checked every cited source (IGN, The Guardian, GamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer, Sony press releases and PlayStation Blog posts, SIE newsroom, MCV/Develop, Road to VR, UploadVR, TechRadar) against the article's dates, names, quotes and figures. About review dates.

History

Formation and early hits

In a 2008 interview with The Guardian, studio director Mike Haigh said London Studio arose from two local studios, "One in Soho, which had two or three teams working on sports titles mainly, and another group in Camden", and dated the merger to "2001-2002". IGN gives 2002 as the founding year, and the studio marked its 20th anniversary in 2022. Jamie Macdonald, then a vice president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, told The Guardian that the early years were carried by The Getaway and EyeToy: Play, followed by SingStar. EyeToy: Play, developed by London Studio, was the first game for the EyeToy USB camera on PlayStation 2, which used motion tracking to put the player's image on screen; Sony said it sold one million units in Europe in four months. SingStar debuted on the PlayStation 2 in 2004, and GamesIndustry.biz reported that it sold 20 million units within six years of its release; Sony shut down the series' online servers on 31 January 2020.

By 2008 the studio occupied six floors of a building on Great Marlborough Street in Soho that had once been owned by British Steel, and The Guardian described it as one of the biggest development studios in the UK. At that time it had teams on EyeToy, SingStar and the PlayStation 3 action game Eight Days, and a small team was in pre-production on a new Getaway game. Sony stopped work on both Eight Days and the Getaway project in mid-2008, saying resources would be moved to projects closer to completion. Former developer Richard Bunn later told Eurogamer that Sony then decided to re-purpose the Soho studio for EyeToy and motion games instead of games like The Getaway.

Camera and augmented reality games

The studio also made EyePet, and it developed the technology for Wonderbook, a book-shaped PlayStation 3 peripheral. When Sony announced Wonderbook at E3 2012, it said the augmented reality in Wonderbook had been developed by London Studio, "the team behind EyeToy and EyePet", and that Wonderbook: Book of Spells was a London Studio title with new writing by J.K. Rowling. Sony launched Book of Spells in the United States in November 2012. It used the PlayStation Eye camera for its augmented reality, with players tilting, rotating and turning the pages of the physical book, and the PlayStation Move controller as a wand. A Sony developer diary that September said the London Studio team had been working on the underlying technology for years. GamesIndustry.biz also listed PlayStation Home among the studio's projects.

Virtual reality

Lead designer Simon Hermitage wrote that the team was introduced to an early PlayStation VR prototype nearly three years before the headset's 2016 launch and had three to four months to build a demo for the Project Morpheus announcement at the Game Developers Conference in 2014. That demo, The Deep, was an underwater encounter with a great white shark. Develop, which described The Deep as a tech demo, reported that it was one of the major first-party demos for Project Morpheus and was playable on the GDC show floor; studio head Dave Ranyard said the team had spent "the last six to nine months" looking at VR "in earnest". Further demos followed: a street luge game at E3, a desk-based gangster heist using two PlayStation Move controllers at GDC 2015, and a car-chase sequence called The Getaway at E3 2015.

These prototypes became PlayStation VR Worlds, announced in March 2016 as five experiences built for PlayStation VR and released on 13 October 2016. In 2017 senior producer James Oates told Road to VR that it was the best-selling PSVR title to date, a figure the outlet noted likely included copies bundled with the headset, and that The London Heist had about twice as many plays as the other four experiences combined. Oates said "the bulk of the studio is purely about VR".

Blood & Truth, a full-length first-person shooter that grew out of The London Heist, was released on 28 May 2019. Sony said the studio worked with producer and director Rick Porras on its motion-capture shoots. In UploadVR's hands-on preview of the 2017 build, players moved between pre-defined waypoints instead of using free locomotion. In its launch week the game topped the UK physical retail chart, beating FIFA 19 by 400 copies; GamesIndustry.biz reported that it was the first VR game to reach number one there.

Move away from VR and closure

On 27 October 2022, the studio's 20th anniversary year, co-studio heads Stuart Whyte and Tara Saunders revealed an untitled online co-op combat game set in a modern fantasy London. Saunders said it was a PlayStation 5 title, "not a VR game like our last title was". Whyte said the concept came from an internal ideation process modeled on the one Guerrilla Games used for Horizon Zero Dawn, followed by an anonymous poll of "hundreds of gamers in the UK and US". He also said the studio's in-house Soho Engine was rebuilt for PS5, but that some of its toolset dated back to the VR Worlds and Blood & Truth technology on PlayStation 4. Saunders had joined Team Soho 22 years earlier. That year the studio won a GamesIndustry.biz Best Places To Work award.

On 27 February 2024 Sony Interactive Entertainment president and CEO Jim Ryan announced a plan to reduce headcount by about 900 people, about 8 percent of the workforce. His message to staff proposed "That PlayStation Studios' London Studio will close in its entirety", subject to collective consultation in the UK. When the studio closed, IGN reported that Sony had yet to announce the cancellation of the fantasy London game. On 21 May 2024 the studio posted a farewell message thanking its past and present players and colleagues, and IGN reported that the studio had closed.

Products

Title	Year	Platform	Notes
EyeToy: Play	2003	PlayStation 2	First game for the EyeToy camera; one million units sold in Europe in four months
SingStar series	2004 debut	PlayStation 2 and later consoles	Karaoke series; online servers closed 31 January 2020
Wonderbook: Book of Spells	2012	PlayStation 3	Augmented reality book with the PlayStation Eye and PlayStation Move
PlayStation VR Worlds	2016	PlayStation VR	Five VR experiences; PSVR launch title
Blood & Truth	2019	PlayStation VR	First-person shooter; first VR game to top the UK physical chart

XR work

Before VR, London Studio worked on camera-based games: the motion-tracking EyeToy titles and Wonderbook, which Sony described as using augmented reality technology through the PlayStation Eye camera. In VR, the studio said it was one of the first teams at SIE Worldwide Studios to get PlayStation VR hardware, and its demos The Deep, the street luge game, The London Heist and The Getaway were used at GDC and E3 between 2014 and 2015 to show the headset to the public. Hermitage wrote that Industrial Light & Magic staff who played The Deep at GDC called it the best real-time shark they had seen, and that Steven Spielberg tried the Getaway demo at E3. The studio's PS4 VR engine work carried over into its later Soho Engine for PS5.

See also

• PlayStation VR
• Sony Interactive Entertainment
• Virtual reality game