Sony is spending £47,000,000 to create new mascot characters for PS5 and beyond

With mascot characters barely being a thing any more on PlayStation, Sony is apparently looking to make new ones, for use across all its businesses.

The concept of the mascot character, for platformers and other games, used be massive. It was at its peak during the 1990s, starting with Mario and Sonic and moving on to newer IP like Lara Croft and Crash Bandicoot, but it didn’t last long beyond that.

By the time the PlayStation 2 era was over, Sony and Xbox had largely given up on the concept, especially as they spent increasingly less time pushing family friendly games. Although why they gave up on that is something of a mystery, given how it’s always been one of the foundations of Nintendo’s success.

However, Sony has apparently decided that they’ve lost too much ground when it comes to recognisable characters and are now funding a 10 billion yen (£46.5 million) programme to create new characters to use across anime, films and ‘other forms of intellectual property’.

To be clear, this is not specifically for PlayStation, but Sony as a whole, with the Nikkei website in Japan suggesting that Sony wants something like Hello Kitty, which they can use in all sorts of different ways and isn’t reliant on just a game or movie to be recognisable.

It’s not entirely clear from the translation as to whether the Hello Kitty example was Nikkei’s or not, but it’s an excuse to show the image below of a Godzilla crossover that’s currently being sold in Japanese McDonald’s, which apart from being adorable is no doubt exactly the sort of thing Sony is thinking of.

In terms of games you can certainly see where the problem is. While Nintendo, or a publisher like Capcom, has a dozen different characters they can quickly slap on a lunchbox or T-shirt, that’s just not the sort of IP Sony, and many other publishers, have been pushing lately.

Sony has Ratchet & Clank and Astro Bot but while their games are good, the characters themselves have never become iconic, and neither have older IP like Sack Boy, the monkeys from Ape Escape, or Toro the PlayStation Cat who was only really big in Japan.

Characters like Kratos are recognisable but they’re not family friendly, while characters like Aloy and Nathan Drake are well known by fans of the games but not necessarily anyone else.

According to the report, Sony has established a ‘dedicated team’ and set up ‘experiential facilities’ to hold events and test new characters on the public.

Whether that will inspire a greater focus on family friendly games is unclear but they, and Xbox, should be doing that anyway. Although the initiative may have been inspired more by Sony’s mishandling of KPop Demon Hunters, which was produced by Sony Pictures but saw them selling all the film rights to Netflix, because they didn’t have enough confidence in the project.

They’ll be keen not to make a mistake like that again, but whether they’ll actually come up with anything of lasting value remains to be seen. The success of things like Hello Kitty can’t be predicted in advance, so simply throwing money at the problem is no guarantee it’ll work.

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