Talk Playstation 3 News

Shuhei Yoshida says this year will be the year for big exclusive titles for the PlayStation 3. Some of them being Killzone 2, MAG, God of War 3, and the list goes on. He also says there are other exclusive titles that haven’t even been announced yet. Hopefully they will be unveiled during GDC or E3. Nothing much has been said in the PSP front, except that we will see some new innovations for the handheld. 

In an interview with David Reeves, he also says this year will be a great year for the PlayStation 3. What he expects out of 2009, is a goal to start making profits off of the console. When they hit their achievement, then they can move onward. He mentions about the video and music service to release in PAL regions by year’s end. 

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In a interview with Kikizo, Eric Boltjes and Angie Smets talked about the cancelled projects Eight Days and The Getaway. It seems that prior to Shuhei Yoshida appointment the project was already scrapped. The news just came out at the same time as the change of power at the head of the company.

Well, I would say Eight Days and The Getaway were already cancelled – we have this process of “green light” meetings… for every project we have these different meetings to see how the project is doing.

But that didn’t mean that these projects were already in production phase as some thought.

Oh no, they were still at prototype phase. That’s the right moment to decide to hold these kinds of meetings, if you do for a game that’s almost done it’s obviously too late to have a look at it!

We hope that PlayStation fans will now have a better opinion about Shuhei Yoshida.

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Did you know that there are five, yes five RPG’s in development by Sony. Shuhei Yoshida finally answers questions regarding RPG’s for the Playstation 3. Yoshida confirmed three things in an interview with Famitsu magazine.

1. Sony is disappointed in their Japanese business model at the moment
2. Sony is working on 3rd party relations
3. Sony is developing 5 RPG’s internally for their fanbase

FM – A strong interest here in Japan is in role playing or deep strategy based games, why has Sony not played to these strengths with the Ps3?

Shuhei Yoshida – The inception of a console is one of trial and error. It is never one set path one takes to success and success should never come from an easy path. When a new console is introduced into the market it is expected of it to do well and to try new things in the process. We have tried many new things with the PS3 and will continue to try an introduce more western style games here to the Japanese market. With that said we are not ruling out our fanbase and their needs we are very aware of what they want and are working internally to create software that fits their needs.

FM – Anything you can speak of here?

Shuhei Yoshida – Names, no. But we have 5 projects underway inside of Sony that will cater to the fanbase you have described. We are also working with 3rd party to ensure we have those kinds of games coming in from their studios as well.

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For some of our readers who where worried and wondering if Gran Turismo would still be coming to the PSP, we have some news for you. Only it’s no release period/date.

Shuhei Yoshida said to Eurogamer.net that the game is still in development.
It seems Polyphony Digital is working on this project but because of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue and Gran Turismo 5, the PSP version got a backseat until they were properly done with the PS3 versions.

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Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida explains why Sony decided against Xbox 360’s optional hard drive and that a mandatory hard was to provide seamless gameplay and solid digital distribution for every Playstation 3 owner.

“It’s one of the things we really supported when the hardware specification was decided for PS3,”

“Like Microsoft did, we could have had an optional hard drive and settled for cheaper combinations of hardware, but if we had done that – from a [development] standpoint – we cannot rely on every consumer to have a hard drive.”

“So that really helps us to focus on [the fact that] every consumer has a hard drive. Now we can cache data so that gameplay is seamless.”

Yoshida gave an example of a game that requires a hard drive to play.

“One example is the Uncharted game we did last year,”

“You don’t this, but the game is constantly caching the data in the hard drive so that you don’t have to wait for loading.”

So there you go, that is why the PS3 has a mandatory hard drive.

“Also having the space for consumers to download stuff allows us to create games only for digital distribution that are a couple of gigabytes in size,”

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Shuhei Yoshida, Sony worldwide studios boss has been speaking with VG247 and had predicted that LittleBigPlanet will be the biggest PS3 game this year ib a global level. Won’t it be THE biggest game this year across all platforms?

“LittleBigPlanet is going to be the biggest title for Sony in all markets this year,”

“History tells us how difficult it is for games developed in Europe or in the US to be successful in Japan, and with this generation we see Japanese consumer supporting more and more games coming from western Europe,”

“It’s massively important, because it has so many things that it’s doing right in our minds,”

“That really shows the way the whole industry will be heading. Giving power to the consumers to express their creativity by creating something that’s fun for others to play. So we really want to make it a global success, including the Japanese market.”

LittleBigPlanet will be released in October so make sure you pre-order it, it will sell… a lot.

Sony has been developing and adding new services to the Playstation Network and best of all for FREE. Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios has confirmed that Sony is looking to extend and bring new features in for PSN.

“We’re more open about approaching and bringing services in to PS3 and PSP,”

“We can’t support all the needs of the consumer and there are great companies providing services on the PC already – so we’re very open to provide the opportunity to those companies to reach our user base as well.”

Sony will continues to provide PSN access for free and more services are to come such as the music/video streaming service called Vidzone.

“There are things we’re looking at, and learning how we can provide a service without people having to pay,”

“But we still get our operation running with funding from somewhere so that we can maintain the level of quality we want.”

I wouldn’t worry about the above statement. Yoshida is basically saying they could get their funding from advertisement.

“We like to provide as many services as possible for free – we already provide our network access for gameplay for free – and the interesting thing about the network side and the Internet business is that there’s a variety of revenue sources.”

Good job Sony! Lets hope they keep it free for a long time to come.

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The replacement to Phil Harrision as the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida explains the lack of third party development and admits the truth.

“Sometimes we struggle to convince them (third-party publishers) to put more resources into the PS3.”,

Metal Gear Solid 4 is the first big AAA exclusive title to hit the Playstation 3, BUT there is a lot more to come this year including Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet.

“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.”

Mr. Yoshida explains that Blu-Ray has a learning curve and this is the reason why developers are slacking slightly for the PS3, saying that “PS3 was that it didn’t come out after a few years of the Blu-ray learning curve”.

“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.”

I guess we will have to see what big impact the exclusives offer this year and i reckon LittleBigPlanet will be the biggest this year.

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The new president of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida says that third party development will favour the Playstation 3 next year. Yoshida spoke with GamesIndustry.biz admitting that the PS3’s launch was disappointing because third party developers had to build their games based upon the Xbox 360’s architecture as Microsoft’s hardware was released earlier.

Yoshida stated:

“…They must have been planning, thinking they have enough time, to port the second game to PS3 and release at the same time with the same quality,”

“So they massively underestimated the effort that was needed to re-architect the game to properly take advantage of the PS3’s multi-core architecture.”

Yoshida also said that there are more and more third party titles now being released on the same day as the Xbox 360 with the same level of quality.

“…and consumers will start to see additional things on PS3 thanks to the storage capacity of the Blu-ray media.”

Lastly Yoshida commented on that PS3 will have the third party advantage in 2009…

“Moving forward I’m totally confident that developers will start to use more from the PlayStation 3 platform. This year is the year of parity, next year is the year of differentiation in favour of the PS3 platform,”

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These two games, Eight Days and The Getaway are both cancelled. Eight Days was a great looking game, in fact, click here to see a video of it. The Getaway, well i wasn’t really into The Getaway games so that doesn’t bother me much but i’m sorry its made a lot of Playstation 3 owners mad.

In an interview with developmag.com, the new president Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida was asked about the Eight Days and The Getaway cancellations:

You mentioned the cancellation of Eight Days and The Getaway – were those two things related? The two games seemed to be big, typical single-player games – not online experiences…

If I am truly honest that was part of the consideration. As I say, there are many projects we want to do and we look at many different angles for them, such as profitability, how long it may take, and where it fits in the portfolio – along with other strategic aspects that we are trying to delivery for the platform. So it was just one of the issues.

Not to worry though, we have great looking games coming up.

As you know Phil Harrison left Sony Computer Entertainment and went to Atari. Shuhei Yoshida will replace Phil Harrison and from the 16th of May he will be president of SCE Worldwide Studios.

So what sort of experience does Yoshida have in store for us?

“Yoshida has been with SCEI since 1993, and was an initial member of the PlayStation business, according to a Sony statement. In 1996, he became producer of the product development department, and in 2000, joined SCEA as VP of product development.”

“Under the leadership of Yoshida, who has proven track record in managing creative talent, SCE WWS will accelerate the software development for the PlayStation 3 and PSP platforms and vigorously expand the gaming market.”

Read more about this here.