Developer Ready at Dawn, responsible for two of the PSP's biggest titles of recent years, has reiterated that it has no intention of developing for Sony's handheld any longer.

"With Chains of Olympus going gold in Japan, we're now officially done with PSP development," the Irvine, California-based studio said in a post on its website.

"So today we sent all our devkits back and seeing all these boxes ready to be picked up definitely marks the end of an era here at Ready at Dawn."

Formed in 2003 by ex-senior members of developers Naughty Dog and Blizzard, Ready at Dawn's debut PSP title, 2006's Daxter, has sold more than two million units and twice has been bundled with different editions of Sony's handheld.

The developer also took Sony's God of War franchise to the handheld, and Chains of Olympus is listed as the highest rated PSP title ever on Metacritic, with an average review score of 91 percent.

More recently the studio finished work on a Wii port of Okami.

"We initially set out to do games that showcased the hardware and became flagships for the PSP," Ready at Dawn president Didier Malenfant told Next Generation in a March 2008 interview. "We feel like we've achieved our goal of not only making great games but making games that are hardware-sellers. We've now come to the point where we have the team, the technology and two IPs that we think would make absolutely incredible games so we're going for it.

"It's two totally different genres," he added. "We're splitting off some guys to work on a smaller project, and those guys will rejoin the rest of the team when the other project enters full production."

Details of Ready at Dawn's next projects remain thin, but Malenfant said that the third version of the Ready at Dawn's Engine is currently running on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360.

Courtesy of Next Generation.

Jun 10, 2008