THQ pledges day one support for Project Natal
Drawn to Life publisher expects family friendly product for early release, but cheap ports of existing Wii games won't fool consumers
Red Faction and UFC publisher THQ has told GamesIndustry.biz that it intends to support Sony's PlayStation 3 wand and Microsoft's Project Natal on day one of release.
Dropping hints that Drawn to Life – the title already in development for Wii – could be one of its first releases, Bilson said that publishers are most likely to release versions of existing franchises and family friendly games to keep costs low initially, rather than risk new IP on unproven technology.
"We'll be there at launch with some very friendly titles for the first audience who will adopt that stuff, which is families," said Bilson in an exclusive interview published today.
"The technology is really excellent, for both Xbox 360 and PS3, so now it's all about the creative versus the business model. What's the installed base like and how much can I spend against those? Of course at first you'll see games that cost less money, but as the installed base grows we'll do more robust stuff."
Bilson said that the company will avoid simply porting titles across to the different motion control systems, and consumers are well aware of attempts by publishers to release quick shovelware on the new systems.
"We're not going to just port stuff over, each one of those platforms needs a lot of design love," he offered.
"The same way we would treat Drawn to Life on Wii, we would treat similar games on those systems. It's about how can we best use Project Natal and how can we best use the Sony controller. We have this stuff at the studios, we've had it for a while."
He added: "But I don't want to just splay stuff across because people will only play it once and not bother again. It's got to be a great Natal game, or a great Sony game, or a great Wii game. Consumers are smart, they won't be fooled by that."
The full interview with Bilson, in which he discusses creating specific projects for the three current generation consoles, as well as lessons learned from the movie production business, can be read here.