Next PlayStation Console Started Developing

Sony has always insisted that it has a ten-year life plan for the PlayStation 3 and the unveiling and upcoming launch of the PlayStation Move motion tracking seems to emphasize that point.



But the company is thinking about the future too, a possible PlayStation 4, and one of its main goals is to involve video game makers in the creation process from the early stages, in order to make sure that a new home console will render it as easy as possible for innovative developers to create new titles for it.

Shubei Yoshida, who is the president of Sony Worldwide Studios, told Develop, a United Kingdom-based magazine, that “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'. So he wanted developers in meetings at the very beginning of concepting new hardware, and he demanded SCE people talk to us.” The executive then went on to confirm that Sony was “undergoing many activities that we haven't yet been talking about in public” with some of them “future platform related activities.”

When the PlayStation 3 was initially launched, a lot of developers said that it was too hard to make video games for it, Steam refusing to create ports of their titles until recently. The console rebounded with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Killzone 2 showing off the power it really holds, and even Steam has announced that it is bringing Portal 2 to the PlayStation 3, complete with Steamworks features.

The problem is that those initial years, when big franchises sold lower on the PS3 and when the console sold significantly lower than the Xbox 360, affected Sony and the company must be eager to avoid having the same issues with its next generation of gaming gadgets.