Feature: 'PlayStation Frontiers: A Tour Of SCEA San Diego'

Author: by Staff

Sony's San Diego studio is perhaps best known for sports games such as NBA '07 for PlayStation 3, but, as this exclusive multi-interview Gamasutra tour reveals, the studio also has major audio, mocap, and even downloadable PSN game plans. In this excerpt, Jim Molinets at director of product development SCEA San Diego, which has recently seen a shifted focus from large-scale PS2 and PS3 titles to creating games for PSN, says that in the end, the economics of full-time staff working on smaller games works out evenly: "I think there's room for both, actually. We're privy to things from a developer standpoint that indie developers can't pay for. We have the ability to utilize our motion capture, and the ability to use our QA directly as a focus test group. We also have expertise that goes years beyond any indie developer on a PlayStation platform. Our group here has several people who have been with SCEA for over 15 years." This is, in part, not just because of a downloadable game's long tail profitability, but because the SCEA internal studios can work off of each other well: "From a business standpoint, of course we want everything to be fantastic and profitable. But you deal with the exact same experience if you're dealing with a PSN title, a PSP title, a PS2 title, or a PS3 title. We want to focus on what our innovation is, how we're going to expand the core experience for the user, and what we're bringing to the table from an experience level from our team members. The internal teams also have an ability to strategically leverage relationships with our partners that we've worked with before, with the music and movie industries." You can now read the complete feature, with much more from SCEA internal sound and mocap teams, including an exclusive look at models used to create architecture in Killzone (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).