Saros Isn't Out Yet, but Housemarque Is Already Thinking Small

According to The Games Business, Housemarque is supporting Saros while evaluating a new project that may be smaller in scope. The Finnish studio, founded in 1993 and formally acquired by Sony in 2021 after years as a close partner dating back to the PS3 era, says it now fully sees itself as a proper first-party PlayStation studio. The report says the team now stands at 120 people, a notable expansion for the developer best known worldwide for Returnal.

By Sony’s current first-party standards, where single projects often involve several hundred developers, Housemarque’s position is straightforward. It wants to meet first-party expectations without automatically chasing more scale. A 120-person team is still small by current AAA console standards, and the fact that Saros needed support from Sony-owned support studio Nixxes underlines that point. Even after growing, Housemarque still looks more like a tightly focused specialist team than a huge internal machine.

The clearer comparison is Housemarque’s own past. When it released the PS4 game Nex Machina ten years ago, the team was only about a third of its current size. Since then, Returnal turned Housemarque into a globally recognized name and cemented its move from an arcade-focused developer to part of Sony’s core internal lineup. But that bigger role does not necessarily mean every next game has to be larger. If anything, it may mean the studio now has the backing to explore polished mid-sized or even smaller projects under a more stable funding and publishing setup.

That also does not have to mean less for the broader PlayStation lineup. It may be closer to a way of filling the gaps. Sony’s first-party slate in recent years has often felt defined by longer and longer production cycles, while the number of genuinely new releases players can count on in a console generation has not always matched the scale of the marketing behind them. If Housemarque can build something smaller alongside Saros, that could give the platform a healthier release rhythm: not just another long wait for the next flagship release, but a sharper, more focused game in between.

Co-founder Ilari Kuittinen says the studio is currently discussing post-launch support for Saros with the player community, while also looking at opportunities that could be “far less huge than Saros.” It is a careful way of putting it, but it still says a lot. First, Saros is not a one-and-done release. Second, whatever comes next is still in the evaluation stage, not at the point where Housemarque is ready to define it publicly. Compared with studios that announce the big vision first and work out the roadmap later, Housemarque at least seems clear on the order: support the current game, then decide how far to scale the next one.

From a player’s perspective, this reads as a practical direction. Housemarque’s strengths were never just about scale or length; they were always about combat pace, input feel, and loop design. Those qualities do not automatically improve when a game gets bigger. In many cases, they improve when the scope is tighter and the execution is cleaner. If Sony is willing to let teams like Housemarque make more concentrated, lower-risk first-party projects within the same ecosystem, that may be more appealing than simply adding another blockbuster with an extremely long production cycle.