Ready at Dawn talks abandoning the PSP, piracy and being original
When it comes to developer Ready at Dawn, creating games for the PSP is just so last week. But while the company has closed the book on any PSP aspirations, going so far as to mail its entire stock of dev kits back to Sony, the developer of both Daxter and God of War: Chains of Olympus has played the reason for abandoning PSP development close to its chest.
It's a mystery, but mysteries give us headaches, so we tracked down Ready At Dawn's president, Didier Malenfant, to find out why exactly the studio has turned up its nose at developing for Sony's sexed-up portable. "We feel like we've done everything we wanted to do with the PSP," admitted the exec. "We have new projects on other platforms and we like to focus on one thing at a time."
Even so, Didier championed the state of PSP development, stating matter-of-factly "Good games sell. Who would have thought?"
Following news of Ready at Dawn's PSP plans, or rather lack thereof, some suggested that piracy might have been a contributing factor in driving the developer away from the platform. We asked Didier if he considered piracy on the PSP to be a real problem.
"We sold over 2.3 millions copies of Daxter and are on track to beat that with Chains of Olympus so we're pretty happy with our sales," he responded. "Could we sell more games if piracy was non-existent? Maybe. But we don't target the market that could be, we target the market that is."
Didier wasn't ready to offer specifics concerning the company's upcoming projects, though he told us that Ready at Dawn is now working on original IP, a first for the now five year old studio. "We have two original IPs in development and some neat ideas with an existing IP. Most of that stuff is next-gen, but we'll see as we move forward what turns into games and/or what goes in different directions."
Wrapping up, we'd be remiss if we didn't question Didier on the off chance Ready at Dawn might want to revisit PSP development in the future, though the exec was noticeably coy. "You can never say never so we're not going to say you won't see any ports of our future games on PSP," he commented, adding that "as far as targeting the PSP specifically like we did in our first two games, we currently don't have any plans for that."
