Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO, Jim Ryan, has said that building and nurturing creative and talented development teams goes beyond “throwing money” at them.
Speaking to Stephen Totilo of Axios, Ryan said that it’s important to give developers the freedom to be creative and take risks. He quoted the example of Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Tsushima, revealing that it was “not the game we thought they were going to make.”
“We are not overly rigid or corporate with our talent,” Ryan added. “We want them to use our hardware as their creative palette.”
A number of Sony’s external partners have echoed Ryan’s statement in the past, and have appreciated Sony for giving developers the freedom they are often denied by major publishers. Housemarque is one of the developers who thanked Sony for allowing it to make Returnal, and more recently Deviation Games and Jade Raymond of Haven Studios praised the company for taking a chance on them.
Allowing developers freedom to create has indeed worked well for Sony. The publisher is now known for releasing hit after hit – both critically and commercially.
“We had a wobble on PS3 and then got our mojo back with PS4,” Ryan told Axios. “And one of the reasons that we did that was a relentless focus on on putting the gamer first.”
Ryan highlighted PlayStation Studios’ delivery schedule as one of the areas that Sony has improved in.
“The output during the PS4 cycle was excellent, but the great majority of those games came in the second half of the cycle,” Ryan continued. “We made a conscious effort to improve on that this time around.”
[Source: Stephen Totilo]
