According to a new rumor, a PS3 series could soon make an unexpected return via PS5. The PlayStation 3 was a weird era for Sony. It’s worst-selling home console to date, Sony fumbled the rollout of the PS3 so badly it never fully ecovered. It did end up outselling the Xbox 360 — Xbox’s best-selling Xbox console to date — but only at the very end and only marginally, unlike other generations. Despite this, several great modern PlayStation franchises got their start during the generation. It was also a generation where PlayStation was still far more experimental and making games that aren’t just high-quality, narrative-driven third-person action games. For example, in the PS3 era PlayStation released PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale. Fast-forward, and skipping a generation, PlayStation is interested in bringing the series back, or at least that’s the claim of a new rumor.
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Developed by the now-defunct SuperBot Entertainment and published by PlayStation, the game was released in 2012 via PS3 and PS Vita, one year before the release of the PS4. If you’re not familiar with it, it is a Super Smash Bros. Ultimate clone but with PlayStation characters. Upon release, the game garnered a 75 on Metacritic and sold over a million copies, but neither of these things was enough to warrant a sequel at the time. A decade later it sounds like this may have changed.
“PlayStation Studios is interested in a sequel to PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale thanks to their acquisition of EVO,” reads the rumor, which comes the way of Twitter user Rythian. “Characters like Crash, Aloy, Deacon, Ellie, Joel, Spyro, and more are planned for the sequel alongside all characters from All-Stars.
The rumor continues: “PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale launched in 2012 on PS3 and PS Vita as a competitor to Super Smash Bros., a PS4 port of the game was planned with new characters and levels but due to the failure of the game with extremely low sales, that was scrapped. While a sequel with the characters mentioned in the first Tweet was pitched, it has not been greenlit by Sony Interactive Entertainment just yet. With Super Smash Bros. pulled from EVO by Nintendo, PlayStation Studios wants a first-party fighting game to fill in the gap.”
While all of this sounds plausible, it’s important to note this is just a rumor, and a rumor about “interest” only. As for the source in question, they’ve both proven reliable in the past and been off the market, so keep this in mind while you take it with a grain of salt. Between EVO and the numerous live-service games in development at PlayStation, this, as noted, seems plausible, but that makes it even easier to fake.
