How does one make a PlayStation game?

[Shrygue]

via PS3 Fanboy


A good question and one that has been discussed over on the official PlayStation blog. Doling out remarkable insight, Shu Yoshida walks us through the creative steps taken in creating the games we love to play. Yoshida is the Senior VP of Product Development at SCEA, so if anyone knows what goes on in game creation, it's this guy. He starts off by telling us a little about Sony's policy on developers. They don't tell their developers "we need an action adventure game, so make one" rather, they take the ideas in and let the studios work on them until they show them off to Yoshida and Phil Harrison. At that point, they can red-light the project or let it continue, it is implied. That's good for keeping more quality games coming while filtering out the less-than-spectacular works, at least, for the internal studios.

After a concept is chosen, there's the whole budget deal. A Blu-ray project on the PS3 generally has costs from $2-5 million just for a prototype (which takes over a year to create). After the prototype is created, the game gets shown to people inside of Sony to let them see how it's progressed as well as to create some marketing segmentation: who's the audience, what's the competition, how can they get said audience interested, et cetera. They bring in their selected audience to preview the game in the next stage and get feedback before development gets too far along to change the more core bits of a game.

All in all, it's a really interesting read despite our attempts to shorten the explanation. Sometimes it's better to just check out the original article, since you can also see some early concept drawings of Calling All Cars! and leave your feedback and questions so Shu Yoshida can check them out.


More information at the official Playstation Blog

[Shadowblind]

How? Well that depends on the system:

PS1= Probably not too hard
PS2=Mild Difficulty
PS3=WTF were you thinking?! With the competition you've got?!

[Lycan_Ste]

How? Well that depends on the system:

PS1= Probably not too hard
PS2=Mild Difficulty
PS3=WTF were you thinking?! With the competition you've got?!

Agreed but i have to add just for fan boys:

Wii: Think of a way to feel the game with a controller.

Xbox: Kiss bill gates hairy ass.

[JKKDARK]

Development Costs:

Xbox - 202 million yen ($1.8 million)

PlayStation2 - 96 million yen ($877,634)

GameCube - 90 million yen ($822,857)

PSP - 90 million yen ($822,857)

PlayStation - 80 million yen ($731,429)

GBA - 53 million yen ($484,571)

DS - 37 million yen ($338,286)

Dreamcast - 25 million yen ($228,571)

[PS3Fanboy]

PS3=WTF were you thinking?! With the competition you've got?!

shut up! the ps3 has no competition it has the best graphics and its shiny, you just wait for mgs4 it will sell 1000's and 1000's of ps3's

[JKKDARK]

shut up! the ps3 has no competition it has the best graphics and its shiny, you just wait for mgs4 it will sell 1000's and 1000's of ps3's

4.5 million units sold... yeah the PS3 hasn't competition.

[PS3Fanboy]

4.5 million units sold... yeah the PS3 hasn't competition.

thats just because people are too poor and stupid to buy a ps3 but if they did they could play games with good graphics

[JKKDARK]

thats just because people are too poor and stupid to buy a ps3 but if they did they could play games with good graphics

No, there are not good games on the PS3. Why would you pay all that money if there are not great games? I prefer buy an Xbox 360 and Wii.

[PS3Fanboy]

No, there are not good games on the PS3. Why would you pay all that money if there are not great games? I prefer buy an Xbox 360 and Wii.

well all the ps3s games are great because they all have good graphics and they look next gen.

[cal360]

well all the ps3s games are great because they all have good graphics and they look next gen.

To me there seems no difference between the graphics on the PS3 and the xbox 360 at this point in time so I don't know what your trying to say and also what makes it look next gen as many consoles are refered to as next gen, including the Xbox 360 and Wii and even the PS1 was refered to as next gen once.