El periódico británico The Guardian habla sobre Eight Days, The Getaway 3 y un hipotético Eye Toy Play (falta confirmación) para PS3. Posiblemente veamos algo de esto en el PlayStation Day.
The Guardian escribió:Visually, Sony's London Studio is indistinguishable from any other game developer: vast floors house densely packed cubicles, whose occupants have customised their spaces with toys, action-figures and computer-generated art.
But without any knowledge of what goes on within, it's still possible to discern that the London Studio isn't just any other developer. For a start, it's situated on Great Marlborough Street in the heart of Soho – development studios are more usually found in ugly industrial estates. And it extends over six floors, each packed with teams beavering away on videogames.
The London Studio is one of the biggest development studios in the UK, with a king-sized reputation to match. It is, these days, the jewel in Sony's development crown, and has produced a catalogue of games which combine vast sales with technological innovation – most notably The Getaway (whose recognisable London setting was ahead of its time), Eye Toy (which eliminated the gamepad long before Nintendo had conceived the Wii) and SingStar, the mass-appeal karaoke game.
Mike Haigh, director of the London Studio, is our host, and he explains how it originally arose from two local studios: "One in Soho, which had two or three teams working on sports titles mainly, and another group in Camden. That was in 2001-2002. This building was owned by British Steel."
"When we first saw it, each floor had literally two or three people working on it, and we were amazed to find a massive wine-cellar downstairs." Jamie Macdonald, Vice President of Worldwide Studios at Sony adds, from his eyrie on the sixth floor: "At first, it was quite a challenge, because the two studios had really different cultures. I don't think I'm being unkind to Camden if I say it did not have a culture of making hit games."
"But we were lucky enough, in the first years, to have The Getaway and Eye Toy Play, and then we followed that up with SingStar, so we got the momentum going. Once you get that, it's a virtuous circle, in the sense that talented people want to come and work for you."
Macdonald and Haigh used to comprise a triumvirate along with Phil Harrison, the unfeasibly tall former President of Worldwide Studios. He was the ultimate head honcho of Sony's in-house development, but recently jumped ship to Atari.
Sony also has studios in Liverpool and Cambridge. So, is London top dog these days?
"Recently, we've been more about sharing," Haigh says, diplomatically. "We, for example, have people helping out with products like LittleBigPlanet and Killzone 2, along with people from Cambridge, and the external development team at Liverpool."
"We're feeling far more like a cohesive group than we've ever felt – which is necessary bearing in mind the number of people that are required to develop for the PS3. When we first started, we had groups of 20 to 30 people, but now we're talking 70 internal people, then maybe 20 or 30 externally. That's really Phil's legacy – he encouraged the studios to work with each other."
Haigh leads us on a tour of the London Studio, starting on the second floor, where the Eye Toy team resides. Sony hasn't yet confirmed it is making a version of Eye Toy for the PS3 and its new PlayStation Eye camera, but heavy hints are dropped, suggesting that in the "medium-term" just such a game will be released, and we see some interesting technology demos that use a torch and polystyrene ball as a pointing device, and also recognise pictures that you draw – this, the team points out, would let you use Eye Toy to create your own landscapes and environments.
Moving up from floor to floor, we see Eight Days – which is just ramping up to full production. To get an idea of the scale of development required on next-gen consoles, the team, currently numbering 63, will expand to about 80 with
a further 40 or so outsourced workers. A small team is working on pre-production for the next iteration of The Getaway, in preparation for being joined by the bulk of the Eight Days team when the latter is completed.
"The idea is to have two pre-production teams and one production team, which flips onto whatever product, at that point of time, is ready to have that team working on it," says Eight Days senior producer Phil James.
The SingStar team demonstrates how integration with the Internet has turned development of certain games into an ongoing process – it constantly works on taking newly licensed music tracks and uploading them to the SingStore.
The team shows the process involved in importing a new track, which can take as little as half an hour for a straightforward commercial pop track, or up to three days for a track with complex vocal harmonies or raps (apparently The Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight took longer than any track so far).
So, does Macdonald get a kick when one of his games outsells one from one of Sony's American or Japanese studios?
Laughing, he replies: "No, no, no, no – yes! Of course – we're all in the industry to make great games."
"One of the things that I've liked about pioneering the social games here is that I've finally been able to show what I do to my sisters and my mum. That's probably the thing I'm proudest of: being part of that movement to take the games out of the bedroom and making them part of the wider cultural experience."
"Of course, that's been taken on very well by Nintendo now, but we're still doing it, along with others, which is great. And now, with Home, we want to take the same approach to the online experience, and for it to be very much a PlayStation experience – I think everyone knows what we mean by that – not a PC wired into the back of a TV. So you turn it on and intuitively have an enjoyable social time."
Lo que viene a decir es que vieron Eight Days (el cual está en plena producción) y que actualmente está siendo desarrolado por 63 personas, aunque el grupo se incrementará hasta las 80.
Respecto a The Getaway 3 dice que en la actualidad está siendo desarrollado por un equipo mas pequeño el cual se ampliará una vez terminado el desarrollo de Eight Days.