Journey and Flower dev considering end to studio's Sony exclusivity
Thatgamecompany exploring multiplatform options for next game
Thatgamecompany is looking to branch out from its PS3 roots. With just weeks to go before the launch of Journey, the last Sony-exclusive game under its current contract, studio co-founder and creative director Jenova Chen admitted to Pushsquare.com that his team was eager to go multiplatform with its future projects.
“Thatgamecompany had a three game contract with Sony, so the past three games had to be Sony exclusive. Right now we are very much exploring ways to bring our games to a bigger audience, beyond just PlayStation,” he said, explaining, “We are still in the process of negotiating, but I hope that we can announce it [soon]. But right now it’s still in the process.”
Considering its crtical and commercial successes with flOw and Flower, and the early buzz on Journey, it's not hard to see Thatgamecompany finding an audience on Xbox Live Arcade or Steam. Odds are Sony might also make a play to keep Chen and his team in-house or at the very least shop out flOw, Flower, and Journey to iOS and other platforms itself.
Future plans aside, Chen also detailed Thatgamecompany's PS3 design strategy for Journey, adding, “When we worked on Journey, this is our third PlayStation Network game, so we wanted to try to make a game about multiplayer, particularly about making the player have an emotional connection with another player. And this is something that I rarely see in a console video game, because most of them are about, y’know, killing each other, or killing something together.”
Journey crosses the threshold to PSN on March 13 in North America, and March 14 in Europe.
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Matt Bradford wrote news and features here at GamesRadar+ until 2016. Since then he's gone on to work with the Guinness World Records, acting as writer and researcher for the annual Gamer's Edition series of books, and has worked as an editor, technical writer, and voice actor. Matt is now a freelance journalist and editor, generating copy across a multitude of industries.
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