Naughty Dog, Insomniac Handing Off Dev Duties For NGP Games

Big-name console developers Naughty Dog and Insomniac are not assuming development duties on planned versions of their respective Uncharted and Resistance series for Sony's upcoming Next Generation Portable. A Game Informer hands-on preview reveals that Sony's Bend Studio is working on the new portable Uncharted title, which has so far seen two Naughty Dog-developed entries on the PS3. The Bend, Oregon-based studio is best known for the Syphon Filter series and for the 2009 PSP port Resistance: Retribution. Insomniac, meanwhile, revealed via tweet that Nihilistic Software is working on an upcoming Resistance game for the NGP. The Bay Area-based Nihilistic worked on one of the iterations the cancelled StarCraft: Ghost, and is currently developing Sony's motion-controlled PS3 mascot showcase Heroes on the Move. Developers and publishers often move development duties to a different studio when moving a series to portable systems, as titles like Resistance: Retribution show. Still, the fact that two major developers are passing up the opportunity to self-develop one of their flagship franchises to Sony's new portable is interesting. Sony brought out a wide variety of third-party publishers to pledge their support for its newly unveiled Next Generation Portable. Many of those developers showed off portable adaptations of popular console-centric series at the unveiling, including Konami's Metal Gear Solid, Sega's Yakuza and Activision's Call of Duty.