Sony has admitted the obvious and announced it is developing the PlayStation 4, but what is interesting is the claim that it will be developer-friendly.
The PlayStation 3 was widely criticised by the development community for being difficult to develop for, but in an interview with Develop, SCE Worldwide Studios head, Shuhei Yoshida, claimed developers will help build the next console.
In the interview, Yoshida said “When Ken Kutaragi moved on and Kaz Harai became the president of SCE, the first thing Kaz said was, ‘get World Wide Studios in on hardware development’,” Yoshida said.
“So he wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us [developers].”
I read the same article earlier and I found it interesting on 2 fronts. Of course R&D has already begun on the next gen of systems, but with Sony saying originally that they wanted the ps3 to have a lifespan of at least 10 years, this seems a bit early in the process.
ReplyDeleteThat said, it's probably a good idea on Sony's part. i recall a fair number of developers who claimed it was difficult to work with the ps3 hardware, and it no doubt affected how they went about their game development.