Sony: Developers will help build the next PlayStation

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.”

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...xt-PlayStation


I wonder what that means in terms of Nvidia providing the PS4's GPU as
they did with PS3.

A logical move on Sony's part considering how often I saw citing of
how much of a pain it is to develop on the PS3 platform.