The excellent Frank Cifaldi from Gamasutra conducted an excellent interview with the excellent group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida. If you’re counting at home, that’s three times the excellence (E3). One of my favorite parts of the interview was Yoshida talking about making the PlayStation 4 accessible to small developers. Check it out:
We believe in smaller developers. They are very creative and they go out of the norm to do something really amazing. So we really want to make it easier for them to come to our platform and publish. And we know there are many things we can do, in talking with these guys and asking what they want us to do. And one effort we’ve been doing in that context is the PS Mobile platform. That doesn’t even require the purchase of a dev kit. It’s totally software driven, and they can develop games…on PC, for example. And once you decide to publish it, you want to test it on the final hardware, but you don’t have to acquire a pricey dev kit.
The approach to PS4 we’re internally working on is, I hope to see somewhere in-between the current model that we have on PS3 and the PS Mobile totally software-driven model. We could continue and go and expand the PS Mobile approach, but the beauty of developing games on console is we allow the developers to go really deep into the hardware, and to unlock the potential. And so in order for us to do that, the developer has to have the dev kit to work on. So at least initially, we have to provide the dev kit to make games on PS4.
One of the things I love about Sony Computer Entertainment is that it has consistently championed independent games from small developers. Games like Journey and The Unfinished Swan have helped developers like thatgamecompany and Giant Sparrow flourish. I believe that Sony has done a much better job than Nintendo and Microsoft at promoting these kinds of games. And it looks like that will continue with the PlayStation 4.
Having a wide variety of content is vital for the ecosystem of any console, especially since the console companies are competing with established mobile ecosystems (Amazon, Apple, Google), as well as each other. Small developers often bring games that are creative and different to the table. It’s cool to see Sony believing in their importance and making an effort to include them.
