Development will favour PS3 in 2009, says Yoshida

Next year will be the year that third-party development will favour the PS3, says Shuhei Yoshida.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, the new president of Sony Worldwide Studios admitted that the PS3's launch year 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.

"...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," he said.

"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."

Although not everything quite came out on time, Yoshida said that Sony was pretty happy with how the titles supported the launch and the system during the first year.

"But 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. That was the miscalculation by both us, and from third parties."

He says that there are now more PS3 titles coming out on the same day as the Xbox 360 version - 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.

Third-party developers are now coming to terms with the PS3, and will no longer need to port over Xbox 360 versions of their games.

"That re-architecture only needs to happen once, and once you pass that, you have the foundation ready."

"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," Yoshida said.

Part One of our interview with Shuhei Yoshida is now online. Part Two will be available tomorrow.