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One of the highest-ranking executives at Sony Computer Entertainment has revealed the company is hard at work on future platform developments.
But with former SCE president Ken Kutaragi now out of the picture, Sony is keen to turn to its first-party studios to help make future PlayStation consoles highly accessible for tomorrow’s game creators.
In an exclusive interview with Develop magazine, Sony Worldwide Studios (WWS) boss Shuhei Yoshida candidly explained how Sony has learnt from past mistakes and is now building tech that developers can get the most out of.
“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].”
And when asked whether this change in philosophy will be applied to future PlayStation hardware, Yoshida replied: “Yes, we are undergoing many activities that we haven’t yet been talking about in public. Some future platform related activities.”
Yoshida was appointed head of WWS at a time when Sony had endured a stuttering start to the PS3 era, as a number of third-party developers struggled to get enough out of the famously powerful console.
In the full Develop interview – published later this week – Yoshida explains in frank detail how SCE underwent a rescue mission for its first-party studios, bringing together top engineers from around the world to build a universal game engine.
This studio-collaborative philosophy at Sony has remained in place ever since, and was a core pillar of the design ideology for Sony’s new motion controller, PlayStation Move.
“I’m spending more time on the hardware platform,” Yoshida added, “connecting hardware guys to developers. That’s my major role now, and Move is one of those new ways of developing platforms.”
