With Call of Duty and Battlefield always doing well in the yearly sales charts, Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios, told Games Industry at the recent Gamelab Conference that they were actually worried when developing LittleBigPlanet 3, because people always want big-budget shooters:
I was very happy to get a very positive reaction when we announced LittleBigPlanet 3. We are concerned a little bit when we work on a game like LittleBigPlanet 3, about how people will react, because people want those big-budget, realistic, military shooters. But there were lots of cheers, a lot of affection.
And the reaction to Nintendo’s games in general, or a game like Splatoon. If you look at the whole industry, and you consider Nintendo, I think the balance is actually better than past years.
With DriveClub potentially being the biggest PS4 exclusive of the year (should LittleBigPlanet 3’s PS3 version turn out to be real), Shuhei says he hears the complaints about the lack of AAA titles:
I hear complaints [about the lack of AAA games]. I do realize that some people are only interested in big-budget AAA games, and for those people they are the only thing that matters. I don’t really understand those people. I don’t know if they’ve tried some of the indie games and decided they’re not interested. Maybe they haven’t even tried. That’s a key question. With Resogun, which we offered for free for a long time on PS Plus, not every PS Plus member downloaded it, and that’s a great, great game. That’s a key question for us.
When asked, Yoshida also confirmed that Sony’s indie push isn’t because they need those smaller titles to fill in the gaps between big releases, “but that’s the end result of having great indie games as well. Almost every week you see an indie game coming out digitally on PS4. Some of them are really, really interesting, beautiful games. We’re fortunate that they’re creating games on PS4, and some of them are choosing to launch their console versions on PlayStation first. It’s fortunate. It really helps.”
