The big announcement out of GDC last week was Project Morpheus. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida spoke to Polygon about the new technology, particularly about Sony’s desire to get it in the hands of indie developers.
“Actually I am very excited to work with indie developers because we’ve been communicating with third party publishers, and the typical conversations go, you know the developers in the third party publishers, they are really excited, but they say, ‘Oh well, I have to get approval from the business side.’ And it’s very hard for big companies to approve something that no one knows if there’s a market for it,” Yoshida said. “But the indie guys are like, ‘I like it, I’ll do it.’ And there are many indie games being created in the marketplace because of that.”
“The indie teams typically want to create something not directly competitive with big companies because they know they don’t have the resource to do it, so they try to come up with a new angle or approach, a new experience so that their game can stand out. And that approach is perfect for making VR, because that’s what we need. We don’t want people to think, ‘How can I port this game to VR?’ We want people to think, ‘What unique thing can we do with this tech?’ So I’m very, very excited to give lots of units to indie PS4 developers.”
Yoshida also talked about the dev kit for Project Morpheus.
“So, the reason we announced at this time is we have dev kit that we can produce in volume and distribute to developers so that they can start serious game development,” he said. “And what we don’t know is, we have a list of things we want to improve in terms of tech, and we don’t know when we can achieve, because we want to make sure that when we have the consumer product, we want to make it very, very easy to use, like plug and play almost. We want, because the VR experience can be pretty intense, we want to make the tech good enough so that most of the people have a really good experience. So we don’t know when we can reach that point.”
However, he did not mention how dev kits would be distributed, simply saying that he hopes to get them into the hands of “hundreds” of developers. Details will likely be posted on the official PlayStation development website.
What are your thoughts on Project Morpheus thus far? How do you think the indie community will respond to it? Let us know in the comments.
[Via]
