Sony is usually known for putting on a strong face, a mask some might say, in spite of bad decisions or other happenings that aren’t, shall we say, in their favor. So when even they admit that they underestimated the support they need and are lacking from third-party developers, a few people are likely to turn and listen.
Sony Worldwide President Shuhei Yoshida told GameIndustry.biz during an interview “Sometimes we struggle to convince them (third-party publishers) to put more resources into the PS3,” adding “We know there’s a lot more that we can do, and with the massive growth of the industry we understand that third party publishers have so many choices, many more than they have resources.”
As regards the late launch of the PS3 and how that may have shifted favor towards Microsoft, he stated “Because the 360 hardware was out earlier, the games were built based on 360 architecture. But still, they must have been planning to…release (the PS3 game) at the same time with the same quality. So they massively underestimated the effort that was needed to re-architect the game to property take advantage of the PS3’s multi-core architecture.”
As regards the Blu-ray format: “Timing-wise the unfortunate situation for the PS3 was that it didn’t come out after a few years of the Blu-ray learning curve…so we had massive amounts of work to do and that really hit the profitability of the company.” He continues, “We tried as much as possible not to pass that cost on to consumers, but we do feel that the early adapters of the PS3 are getting good value (with the integrated Blu-ray)”.
“It’s impossible to bring the level of support that we feel is important for the PlayStation 3 platform without the third parties’ continued support”, he admitted.
