Sony is building a new dev team to work with Visual Arts and Naughty Dog on a ‘AAA’ title

Sony is building a new development team in collaboration with PSS Visual Arts and Naughty Dog, to make a new triple-A game.

A new job listing for a senior producer role at PlayStation refers to the new team and states that it’s being put together to work on a new project.

“Sony PlayStation is building a new internal game development team in partnership with PSS Visual Arts, an award-winning, full-production group, that specializes in Animation, Motion Capture, Cinematics, Art, and Scanning,” the listing reads.

“This high visibility project is being developed in collaboration with Naughty Dog. Though currently unannounced, we have a clear vision and plan to release.

“Using our existing expertise and premier talent, we will guarantee a high visual quality bar for the game and a compelling experience for our players.

Although the listing doesn’t give more information on the scale of the specific game being planned, it states that “as the ideal candidate, you will be proficient in all aspects of AAA game production and management”.

It also asks that candidates have worked on “two or more published AAA titles, at least one of which must have been as a Senior Producer during the entire development cycle”. This implies that the project will be a big-budget title.

While potentially unrelated, earlier this year Naughty Dog’s newly-appointed recruiter seemingly hinted that Sony was planning future Uncharted releases.

In a post on LinkedIn, Christina-Marie Drake McBrearty said she was “scouting for talent at every level” and that it was “special being able to be building future teams for not only new titles but for the legacy of Uncharted”.

Further reading

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Naughty Dog recruiter seemingly hints at plans for more Uncharted games

The studio is “building future teams for not only new titles but for the legacy of Uncharted”

Michael Mumbauer, who has since departed Sony, founded the San Diego-based Visual Arts Service Group in 2007 with the goal of growing some of PlayStation’s biggest franchises.

For many years it worked as a support studio on series like Spider-Man and Uncharted, but then had ambitions to lead its own projects.

The team originally started work on the PS5 remake of The Last of Us, but Sony was reported to have failed to adequately back Mumbauer’s team to achieve its ambitions and it was again switched to a support role, with Naughty Dog taking over as the lead development studio.