I wrote for Naavik about Sony’s acquisition of Savage Game Studios. Read the full article here.

Why I wrote about this

Not only do I know Savage’s CEO founder Michail Katkoff quite well, the company is literally our neighbor in Helsinki. Their office is sandwiched between two Lightheart rooms at Maria 01, the local startup campus. Couldn’t pass writing about this one!

The gist of it

PlayStation Studios acquired Savage Game Studios, a young Finnish-German startup founded in 2020 by industry veterans from Rovio and Wargaming. The team, around twenty developers split between Berlin and Helsinki, had raised $4.4M to build a free-to-play mobile shooter. Now, they become Sony’s first fully internal mobile-focused development team.

The move aligns with Sony’s previously stated goal: by 2025, roughly half of its new game releases should be on mobile and PC. Historically, PlayStation Studios has been synonymous with premium, single-player console blockbusters—Uncharted, The Last of Us, Horizon, God of War. Savage represents a structural shift toward free-to-play and live ops expertise.

This follows Sony’s $3.6B acquisition of Bungie earlier in 2022. Bungie is famous for Halo and Destiny, but perhaps more importantly, it mastered the transition from boxed AAA to ongoing live service at scale. With Bungie, Sony gained serious big-screen live ops muscle. With Savage, it is attempting to build that same capability natively for mobile.

Savage can now ship its original mobile shooter as the first true PlayStation mobile IP. Or it can plug into Sony’s vast portfolio and adapt a known franchise for mobile. Both options are compelling: new IP offers creative freedom, while leveraging existing brands lowers market risk. Either way, this acquisition won’t be the last: if the future of AAA is truly cross-platform, Sony needs more than one mobile bet.

Key takeaways

  • Savage is Sony’s first internally operated mobile studio.
  • Sony is serious about live service and free-to-play, not just premium console titles.
  • The Bungie and Savage acquisitions together signal a platform-wide shift toward recurring revenue models.
  • This is likely the beginning of a broader mobile M&A push from PlayStation.