FromSoftware was disappointed by Sony's behaviour at the launch of Demon's Souls on PS3
Although it wasn’t the studio’s first game, it was with Demon’s Souls in 2009 that FromSoftware began to forge its international reputation. At the time, the title was a PS3 exclusive.
As Shuhei Yoshida revealed in the Last Stand Media podcast, the partnership between Sony and FromSoftware for the game didn’t go well. In fact, the Japanese studio didn’t want to work with the company again immediately. Otherwise, we would have got a Demon’s Souls 2, but we got Dark Souls in 2011.
At the time, Sony failed to see the potential of this new IP and decided not to distribute it outside Japan. The reason was a chaotic playtesting due to the game’s excessive difficulty. As a matter of fact, Atlus ended up publishing Demon’s Souls in the U.S. and Bandai Namco in Europe.
"FromSoftware was already working on the sequel, but they were so disappointed with how PlayStation treated them, we wanted to work with them again but they passed on it."
"For my personal experience with Demon’s Souls, when it was close to final I spent close to two hours playing it and after two hours I was still standing at the beginning at the game. I said: ‘This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.’ So I put it aside."
"We definitely dropped the ball from a publishing standpoint, including studio management side. We were not able to see the value of the product we were making."
Relations between FromSoftware and PlayStation then warmed up, and the two teamed up again to give birth to Bloodborne on PS4 in 2015. Today, Sony has even become the majority shareholder of Kadokawa, the parent company that owns the studio.
