Mark Cerny is to blame for Knack. He is behind the concept and story of the IP.
https://youtu.be/LqMkQostWhI
His job was to get a Japanese team to work together because JS had problems to communicate and they were lacking the structure Japanese people are known for.
https://kotaku.com/how-sonys-most-creative-studio-rose-from-the-ashes-1458030068
Gavin Moore faced the same problems when the core team for Puppeteer grew bigger. At first they were 14 people in concept and prototyping stage as he talked about at GDC 2014. They brought in more staff in the last year and were 65 people. What he did was to make them into small teams and they had a review every second week. He wanted his staff to break out from that box "Gavin is God, obey him" to "this is not Gavin's game, this is our team's game". He worked hard for that craftmanship and when it finally started to click, the staff didn't no longer talking with their team only, they even started to communicate with the core team. Gavin was impressed, it was amazing to see, especially for a Japanese team.
2011~2013 were hard times for JS. Toyama didn't faced the same problems because he had a small team for Vita but when he increased staff for GR2 who came from Puppeteer and outside of that he was used to lead a team. We got GR2 on PS4 quite fast.
As time went on and JS had learn about structure Becker hired more and more staff. He wants JS to produce more titles than they did in the past. Outsourcing to other studios it's harder for Shu and others to playtest it. People here are saying JS should outsource when that was exactly what they did in the PS2 and PS3 days.
http://m.ign.com/articles/2017/06/30/how-playstationas-japan-studio-stands-out-a-ign-first
"At Japan Studio I think we have a lot of talented people, but for whatever reason I think we fell behind in terms of technology, and that started way back in the PS2 days and PS3," he said. "Japan Studio wasn't producing that many titles. And so with PS4, we're really starting to build the technology back up."
He wants JS to be more involved with game development so the staff learns from that experience and can improve for the next game and become better. Knack 2 may be a shit game but the staff got to learn about varied things like in-game cinematic, QTE, etc that could be useful for a better game.
https://blog.us.playstation.com/201...udio-allan-becker-speaks-to-playstation-blog/
PlayStation.Blog: How has JAPAN Studio changed in the last two or three years?
Allan Becker: We have become better focused and better prepared to compete in a fast and ever changing industry. The Studio is more open to new technologies and ideas and willing to grasp those opportunities when they come along. But at the heart JAPAN Studio still retains its core ideal to make creative, novel and imaginative titles.
PSB: More generally speaking, how do you choose which studios to collaborate with?
AB: The key has less to do with the studios but which creative individual we wish to collaborate with. They are the one that we will work with, sometimes on a daily basis. So it is important to choose someone who has the same mindset as we do.
Miyazaki and FromSoftware have been an exception to that rule on PS4. FromSoftware has a good reputation and is a quite large studio. If we mention Shift and GenDESIGN for example they didn't really produced the title they were the creative force for the game. Behind concept, game design and story. GenDESIGN is around 14 people and Shift was 18 people on Freedom Wars (whilst the dev team worked on GE2) as Dimps produced it when JS was lacking staff and team structure at the time.
It depends on projects how Becker look at them. Oreshika series was produced by Alfa System and created/directed by Shoji Matsuda.
