Instead of just giving us a vague two word answer of “long time” for how long Sony was expected to support the PlayStation 3 after PS4 launch, Shuhei Yoshida gave a rather detailed response in an interview with Giant Bomb:
After [Gran Turismo 6], most… all of our large teams will move on to PS4. But we’ll continue with smaller teams or external partners to support PS3 and PS Vita.
Definitely our biggest focus is going to be on PS4 games, but many games – especially digital titles you are seeing – we are announcing a lot of games that are coming to PS4, PS3 PS Vita, and we love it. People love the Cross Buy feature that we try to put in many games so that you just buy once [and get it on all the platforms]… we’d definitely like to continue with that.
He later added, “We’ll continue to support [the PS3] as long as there is demand.”
The interview then rolled on with Shuhei talking about whether there was any pushback from people at Sony about having so many games include Cross Buy on all Sony systems, rather than charging a small fee to upgrade:
There are certain periods that we had to wait for confirmation from our publishing side – our partners – they tried to be good business people… We are closer to consumers. […] In the end, they came back [and said], “Yeah, let’s do that.”
So, because it’s digital games and because it’s very easy to develop games on PS4, architecture-wise, it just makes sense to develop all platform versions simultaneously and offer them as a package, so more people are likely to be interested. And if we can get more sales that way, then everybody should be happy.
I don’t know if we can apply this approach to larger games… probably not… but definitely digital games. We definitely consider that.
Do you love Cross Buy as much as Shuhei does? Let us know in the comments below.
