While many may write off The Last of Us as simply being an Uncharted clone, and Beyond: Two Souls as just a re-skinned version of Heavy Rain, Sony’s Scott Rohde feels quite differently about the company’s first party lineup, convinced that both of these titles are huge risks for the publisher.
Speaking with GameSpot, Rhode explained that Sony has a lot to offer on the software side of things, so much content in fact, that they could only cram half of PlayStation’s offerings in their E3 press conference.
Our press conference could have been twice as long because we have that much content that we could show, we just didn’t have time to show it all.
These are all innovations that other companies would be a little scared to embrace, I believe. So innovation is top of the charts at PlayStation.
If this truly is the case, I’m sure many of you are just as puzzled as I am with their decision to spend so much time at the conference showing off Wonderbook, but I’ll save that rant for another article. Rohde went on to point to both Naughty Dog and Quantic Dream’s upcoming games as being two of the biggest risks for Sony, saying:
If you can find another publisher in this industry who would build Beyond, I’d like to meet that publisher. I really think that [Beyond] is as far from ‘safe’ as it gets. Heavy Rain, by itself was not a ‘safe’ title. And to do it again with a totally different story, a larger investment, and to bring Hollywood in, to really enhance that genre that really isn’t touched by many folks in our industry, I think is anything but ‘safe.’
And when you think about what Naughty Dog is doing, when I hear ‘safe’ I hear Uncharted 4, Uncharted 5, Uncharted 6, Uncharted 7. And for a developer of that caliber, this late in the cycle of the platform, to introduce a totally new IP for a different audience – meaning going from T-rated to M-rated – I think is anything but ‘safe.’
While both Naughty Dog and Quantic Dream are pushing the envelope for what games can be, there’s reason to believe both titles will turn out to be compelling game experiences that will do incredibly well for Sony. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read up on our previews for The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls.
