Rumour: Sony Closing Zipper (Unit 13, SOCOM, MAG)

nofi 43 Comments

According to Kotaku, Sony is in the process of closing up first party studio Zipper Interactive, the guys responsible for the SOCOM series, MAG and Vita title unit 13, which I personally really liked.

The studio has been going since 1996, but was bought by Sony ten years later and was hugely important during the PS2 years with their brand of tactical third person shooter.

The series quietened down a little this gen, and the latest SOCOM suffered by coming out around the time of the big PSN hack.

Sony closed fellow developers Bigbig just before their final game – Little Deviants – was released on Vita. The company hasn’t commented on Kotaku’s rumours, citing their usual policy.

Our thoughts go out to anyone affected.

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43 Comments

  1. Am I wrong in thinking that Unit 13 is updated every now and then with new challenges and whatnot? How would Zipper’s closure affect this?

    Didn’t really rate SOCOM 4; the PSN hack wiped it off my to-buy list last year.

    MAG was splendid though and it would be a shame not to see a sequel some time in the future.

    • Unit 13 gets a new challenge every day, but I imagine they could be automatically generated or set up in advance and just added automatically every day, so this (hopefully) won’t have any effect.

    • There is a new challenge every day, but I guess it’s automatically generated with random game mode, map, mission objectives and start/exit points, similar to the ‘dynamic mission’ variants of the campaign missions. The difference is that in the daily challenge all players get the same random mission and can compete for the high score.

  2. Kotaku just LOVES bad PS3 News, what another CR*P site i NEVER visit :D
    + if true, hopefully most of the guys at Zipper will get Jobs with other SONY studios, because they do make brilliant games.

  3. Wow, didn’t not see this coming. A shame for such a great studio to be shut down. Hopefully they all find something else along their path.

  4. More wood behind fewer arrows is the way the industry is going as AAA gaming just means established franchises.

    SOCOM didn’t really work this gen, of course the mitigating circumstance of the hack probably didn’t help & although MAG was big, it wasn’t really the system seller it sounded like on paper.

  5. I’m sorry, but in six years Zipper have produced three games, all that received average ratings. MAG was the best of the bunch but was wrought with issues, which it took the company way too long to fix, and then they killed the community support by offering barely over six months of post-launch support. SOCOM 4 was awful, ignored every request that fans had from the series, and even ignoring the PSN hack, was so broken online that I couldn’t even review it. I’ve not played Unit 13, so can’t talk about that, but when there’s other Sony first-party studios doing much better work than Zipper I can completely understand why they had to go.

    • Yeah, from the perspective of non-Vita users it won’t be a huge loss.

    • You could equally say that Zipper have released 3 games in 3 years, or 9 games in 10 years…

      MAG was released in January 2010, with the last patch in March 2011. They might have been sluggish on resolving certain issues, but that’s a good long tail of support there.

      I’m not sure about SOCOM. I didn’t really like the look of it as much, but I’d bet Zipper were told to focus gameplay on the Move, and that forced them to change the gameplay. Regardless, it also launched at the worst possible time, with the PSN hack.

      Unit 13 does look pretty good, though. Maybe it’s not reviewed quite well enough, and that’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

  6. This is very unnerving given the fact that Zipper is and has been for some time now, a popular first party studio, so who is to say another popular first party studio wont have to suffer the same fate at some point in the future.

    then of course there’s Unit 13, a very new game that will have to be constantly updated over time (like most games, improvements can always be made)
    who will take the reins of that content if Zipper is closed?

    its understandable why Sony would want to close Zipper (it has of course seen better days) but its disturbing to imagine all of those Zipper members not working with Sony anymore and to that extent i hope some of them will be able to move into another first party studio, though im not sure if that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

    Sony is losing some major developers and i dont see them buying/creating new ones anytime soon so im somewhat worried.

  7. Let’s hope it’s just a rumour

  8. I will buy Unit 13 as soon as payday hits

    • Don’t. Unless by then they’ve released a patch that fixes the most serious issues the game has.

      Unit 13 is a great little game, but I’ve completely stopped playing it due to the issue where sound cuts out and it locks the Vita completely. This really needs to be sorted soon if they want the game to pick up. Also there are reports of online disconnecting a lot (could be connection issues) and the leaderboards are mostly non-functional. But the game part itself is nice, when it’s working.

      • Never experienced or heard of this issue maybe you one of the unlucky ones.

        Get the game money well spent & plays nicely

      • Maybe. But if I hadn’t already I wouldn’t risk giving them money, and then turning out to be one of the “unlucky ones”.
        Complaints about these bugs is a part of what little traffic there is on the u13 boards, so I assume the problem is big enough that the lack of information from Zipper isn’t exactly impressive.

      • @Deathbrin
        This isn’t the same issue. It affects both retail and downloaded, and hangs the vita completely every now and then after the sound cuts out while playing the game. If anyone gets the game remember “30 second press on the power button to reset”

      • not had any problems myself.

  9. Shutting the main SOCOM developers would be a huge surprise, but if their games haven’t really sold well since the PS2 era…

    Hope this isn’t true.

  10. I hope this is a lie, really like Zipper, if it’s sadly true, I hope Sony will open a new studio with the same people involved

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