Every year, Bloodborne fans pray for the birth of another game set in FromSoftware’s Lovecraftian world. Every year, we’re no closer to a Bloodborne 2 or even a Bloodborne Remastered. But why? PlayStation’s former head honcho, Shawn Layden, blames it on the tricky situation of rights ownership.
Asked about the noticeable lack of Bloodborne in the decade since its blood moon shone down on us all, in an interview with The Trophy Room podcast, Layden explained that returning to any beloved game is tough.
“Bringing back old games has a certain challenge to it,” he said. “Can you do something that is not only respectful of the original, but can you, you know, recreate the phenomenon as it were?”
Bloodborne’s situation is slightly more complicated, though. It seems that the rights are somehow split between original publisher PlayStation, developer FromSoftware and the studio’s primary stakeholder Kadokawa Corporation.
“There’s a lot of involved rights associated with it, and in something like that – where Sony’s in there and [FromSoftware] is in there and From’s parent company is in there – I think just getting everyone to sign off on the same thing is probably the biggest challenge there,” Layden said.
Having led the PlayStation brand during most of its PS4 golden years, Layden said working with FromSoftware on Bloodborne and the original Demon’s Souls was “fantastic.”
Despite endless calls for a comeback and very stable sales more than a decade on, Bloodborne itself is still stuck on the PS4 – though it’s still playable via backward compatibility on the PS5, I should add. The closest we seemingly got to a Bloodborne comeback came from Bluepoint Games, which reportedly pitched a remake sometime before parent company PlayStation shut down the acclaimed studio, though FromSoftware supposedly didn’t want the project to go ahead.
Another former PlayStation executive, Shuhei Yoshida, previously speculated that Bloodborne hasn’t been remade because game director and soulslike pioneer, Hidetaka Miyazaki, would prefer to handle it himself: “Miyazaki-san really, really loved Bloodborne, what he created… So I think he is interested but he’s so successful and he’s so busy, so he cannot do it himself, and he doesn’t want anyone else to touch it.”
Elsewhere, a Bloodborne animated feature is in the works with YouTuber JackSepticEye attached as a co-producer.