More Developers Continue To Praise Sony’s PS4 Efforts

Avalanche Studios is believed to be working on Just Cause 3 for next gen, a game the developer will unveil at E3 2013. The studio took some time off development to talk to Gamasutra about PS4 and Sony’s new attitude, revealing that the new console is very easy to develop games for. The studio also praised Sony for opening up the console to indie developers.

Speaking of indie devs, Double Fine founder Tim Schafer is also on record lauding the new console from Sony, making known that they’re currently testing PS4 to see what they can do with it. More on that later.

Said Avalanche Studios’ creative director Stefan Ljungqvist:

I don’t think big-budget games are going away. There’s going to be less of them. But that’s a good thing, because maybe we don’t need forty first-person shooters. I don’t want to play them all [laughs], but maybe we need one, two or three.

On PS4, he said:

What I like now is that there are more opportunities to be creative. Maybe over the course of the past five years, developers have pitched creative or more artistic games, but publishers had been more careful of betting a lot on those games, because they’re associated with some risk. But maybe now they can [take more risks] because they need to be more unique in the marketplace.

Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg chimed in:

[The PlayStation 4 is] definitely easier to develop for. I think their approach for letting smaller developers in is fantastic. And all of the [control] inputs creates an opportunity. They’ve created a platform for us to make better games.

Back to Tim Schafer and his glowing approval of Sony’s PS4 strategy:

Let me just say we’ve been talking with Sony, can I say that? I don’t know, I think I might get in trouble.

This is one of the first times where we’ve been approached by a platform holder like Sony and asked, ‘first, what do you guys want from this new box? We have this new feature, what could you do with it?’. We’ve already got some guys playing with some of the new features to see what we can do with it.

Yeah, I mean it’s not that hard to win over developers because all we want is to be treated with just a little bit of reason. Because often you just get told the most unreasonable, crazy things and you’re like ‘really? That’s how you’re going to treat us?’

ust doing things like letting us patch our games when we want to, put our games on sale and release our games in territories that they should be released in – just doing a few things like that can make a developer very enamoured of you.

PlayStation 4 sees a release holiday season 2013.