Sony Hasn't Forgotten About the PS3, But "Large Teams Will Move On To PS4," says Shuhei Yoshida

In a recent interview with Giant Bomb, President of Worldwide Studios, Sony Computer Entertainment Shuhei Yoshida gave the scoop on the impending changes to PlayStation’s attention as the focus shifts to the PS4. Fortunately for those of us who have built up quite a game library, the PS3 won’t be left in the dust just yet. But Shuhei didn’t stop there:

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.

But while that doesn’t tell us exactly how long the PS3 will stay in the limelight, we can rest easy, as Yoshida later added:

“We’ll continue to support [the PS3] as long as there is demand.”

Thanks, Shu! We’ll keep that demand up, then. Right, guys?

But how do people on the inside feel about this? Does Sony feel the pressure with so many games available with Cross Buy? Will they be able to keep it up? Fear not, says the president:

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.