It’s “lesson learned” for Sony, which says it will involve its game studios in the development of new gaming platforms so they won’t be so difficult to work with in the future.
Remember last year, when Sony Computer Entertainment President Kaz Hirai said the PlayStation 3 was intentionally designed to be difficult to work with so developers wouldn’t be able to immediately max out its capabilities? That was pretty funny stuff but it was also at least half-true: Intentional or not, the system is a notoriously difficult development platform. But it sounds like that strategy didn’t pan out quite as well as anyone had hoped, because Sony Worldwide Studios chief Shuhei Yoshida said that in the future, platform development will very much involve the software guys.
“When Ken Kutaragi moved on and Kaz Hirai became the president of SCE, the first thing Kaz said was, ‘Get World Wide Studios in on hardware development’,” Yoshida told Develop. “He wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us [developers].”
The new approach apparently sprung from a “rescue mission” for SCE first-party studios and is also a “core pillar of the design ideology” on the upcoming PlayStation Move motion controller. “I’m spending more time on the hardware platform, connecting hardware guys to developers,” Yoshida said. “That’s my major role now, and Move is one of those new ways of developing platforms.”
