INTERVIEW: SHUHEI YOSHIDA, SCE STUDIOS
initiative that also includes Vita. Our group in Tokyo created a PS Mobile SDK that small indie developers can download to their PC and develop games that work on PS-certified Android devices as well as on Vita. I’m hearing lots of independent developers say they’re interested in using PS Mobile to create small games to release on PS Vita. In the past, becoming a certified, licensed developer for the PlayStation platform was not an easy thing to do. The development kit was somewhat expensive. With PS Mobile, people can just download the SDK from our website and when they decide to publish their game, they can pay us just $99 per year to become the publisher of their content, so that includes PS Vita.
It all comes from our understanding and appreciation of the widening availability of gaming opportunities for consumers across different devices. We’d like to reach out to these new people who have discovered gaming for the first time on their smartphones and tablets.
So innovations such as the dual touchscreens will only have their potential realised by a massive group of developers outside Sony’s control? Is this part of your strategy for demonstrating Vita’s potential? That’s a really interesting way to look at things. I agree we professionals believe we know everything, but of course we don’t. When we have tens of thousands of people trying things independently, then the great ideas will come. I can’t wait to see what kind of games will come out via PS Mobile because there are many more people on the system, as you say.
Are you looking to try and capture a lot of those mobile-produced
games as PlayStation exclusives? Is that a pre-requisite for budding developers? No, it’s not like that. We as a studio make games only for our platforms and provide content that is only on PlayStation, but nowadays, big games require a huge investment. When you’re making games on
Blu-Ray disc for PS3, you have to pay $30 to $40 million to make one game, and it just economically doesn’t make sense to create the game on only one platform if you’re an independent publisher. So, we totally understand the need for publishers to diversify, but because we have platforms that have unique features, we talk to publishers when they’re working on their IP to help them figure out what features on our platforms it makes sense to take advantage of. PS Vita, to us, is nothing like any
other system, so anything that comes to PS Vita to me is an exclusive. So that’s a good thing, and I think people find that even an experience which was originally made for PS3 translates well. For example Rayman Origins plays and looks beautiful on PS Vita, even without changing the game, although they did add touch control. That experience will be unique, even if the content is the same.
Are you happy with Vita’s showing at your E3 press conference? Well, actually, I got lots of tweets to my account complaining that there weren’t many PS Vita games being talked about. In retrospect, we should’ve spent more time showing and talking about our PS Vita titles. We had 25 PS Vita games playable on the show floor, some of which are really great titles I’m very excited about. We could have spent more time talking about those, but we had
a clear intention this year to make the total press conference shorter –we’re notorious for holding lengthy ones. I hope we accomplished that with this year’s conference, but from the perspective of people who are waiting for more information on Vita titles, we weren’t able to provide that. I’m hoping journalists looking at the games on the show floor got the word out that way.
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Ambitious and perhaps unconventional projects –from sweeping narratives like Beyond and The Last of Us to Vita music title SoundShapes –have been at the heart of PlayStation’s philosophy from the beginning, says Yoshida
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Will the future of PlayStation look harder at add-on services, further motion sensing, augmented reality or cloud gaming? I think those avenues are valid and it’s definitely a good idea to make use of cloud gaming technologies. We’ve been looking at the variety of technologies we could include in the PlayStation ecosystem. We looked at different motion sensing
We’re looking at what OnLive is doing and considering how this tech can be part of PlayStation.
Shuhei Yoshida, Sony
tech and our vision analysis technologies to create PS Move. We’ve been looking at streaming
tech as well, such as Remote Play. This was where you connect your PSP through the internet to your PS3. It is like a cloud gaming service at a fundamental level in terms of how the mechanic itself works. Cloud gaming services allow us to stream games via a server to different devices, but in order for it to become practical, the internet has to be very robust in terms of bandwidth and
latency. As with all infrastructures, it takes time for it to become widely available. Some consumers in the US and some parts of Europe have very robust and fast net speeds, so cloud gaming would be practical in those markets, but not when you look at the wider, broader global market.
When there are faster internet connections, gaming in the cloud as a subscription service could become a reality. We’re looking at what OnLive is doing, and the tech around that, and considering how this can be a part of PlayStation.
This console generation has lasted longer than any before it – could this trend increase further for the next generation? Are hardware updates becoming less important? Well, we’re not talking about any next gen PlayStation hardware ideas as yet, because we’re updating the firmware and adding new services and devices which work alongside PS3, and developers are finding new ways to create new experiences for the current console. Also, the PS3 is an incredibly advanced piece of hardware, and it’s taken developers a long time to really maximise the use of the tech. Look at new games like The Last of Usor Beyond– they’re much improved from earlier PS3 titles. From a consumer standpoint, I’ve gone from NES to SNES to PSone, PS2 and PS3, and I totally agree that when the platform matures, the very best games come out. I also agree that on PS3, games are really reaching their peak in terms of depth, graphical fidelity, playability and network features. This is the result of many years of hard work by the development community.
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