That's false: Bloodborne was co-developed between From Software and Japan Studio.
You know....the Japan Studio that was founded by SIE (Sony) decades ago? And that SIE (Sony) shut down near the start of this gen (shifting remaining members to Team Asobi)? Yeah....
Keep pushing this easily disproven narrative.
You can look in the credits.
Japan Studio helped produce the game, but to say they co-developed it is extremely misleading.
Again, you're not good at this.
I mean they went to FromSoftware (more specifically, Miyazaki) with the idea, he had been wanting to make a gothic horror game so he agreed, but on the condition he got to use the next gen hardware, they let him. The man in
this video at 0:13 is Masaaki Yamagiwa, he was a producer at Japan Studio at this time, and he is speaking about everything they wanted the game to be like towards the half-way marker, and even commenting about how they wanted to do combat, so yes, Japan Studio did in fact co-develop Bloodborne, they are listed as Sony Computer Entertainment in
the credits though at around 2:52, not Japan Studio.
Since the early/mid '90s until today, Japan Studio basically has two parts. One that develops internal games (now called Team Asobi, its name changed multiple times). And the other publishes and supports 2nd party games (now called XDEV Japan or XDEV Japanese team, its name changed multiple times), being Bloodborne one of them.
The role of Japan Studio in Bloodborne, like in all the other 2nd party games they did and keep doing, is managing this external lead gamedev studio (in this case FromSoft) to make sure they deliver what they have to deliver on time, on budget, with the desired quality, and making sure they have all the internal and external resources/support teams/outsourcing teams (also managed from that XDEV team) they may need or helping them with some obstacle they may face. Basically, the game production role of the publisher's side.
Meaning that Japan Studio/XDEV team normally also manages the localization, voice acting, art outsourcing, additional programming, testing, marketing etc., a list that may vary a bit depending on each project and team, and their preferences.
They weren't shut down, they kept doing that 2nd party publishing/support thing in recent games like Stellar Blade or Rise of the Ronin. Same goes with their internal development team, they are still there and recently releasing Astro Bot. They continue doing the same job and in the same building. They simply got rebranded and split, as several times were previously rebranded and split or put together. Even if they kept doing these two things and always in the same building.
I had never heard of Next Fests, but then I quickly found out why. No one cares about them.
They are a great visibility opportunity for indie devs, many get there most of their wishlist/demo plays before launch, or a game sale/preorder bump when already released.
As I remember Valve doesn't gatekeep it other than limiting the amount of Next Fests your game can appear (cant't remember now, I think it was 2 or 3, or maybe 2 or 3 in a row). So any indie -passing the obvious minimal cut- dev can be there.
To be featured in a State of Play or Nintendo stream is way more complicated because there's a very limited amount of game slots per year.
For the player side, this results on way more games being highlighted, so there are more chances of getting one there of your favorite niches. And well, online in the console events many of the featured games have demos.
