Gio Corsi, Director of Third Party Production for SCEA, was very vocal about how his team “will work closely with our publishing partners to bring their beloved IPs to some new places.” This started with Borderlands 2 being announced for the PlayStation Vita, and then involved people submitting games they’d like to see, with the building of a list they could go through being the end goal.
As Adam Boyes told Kotaku, “We’ve got a massive list – we’re calling everyone trying to get that list as much as possible. A lot of issues come around clearances or intellectual property ownerships and stuff like that. And there’s of course always a balance because you wanna share as much information as possible, but when you’re dealing with other peoples’ properties, it’s always a balance.”
Boyes continued by saying how “within the next six months we’ll have at least one, if not a few announcements to make on that front. They’re hustling. They’ve got a full team now – three guys now, full-time – working on the list and hunting it all down, making sure we’ve got a lot of stuff coming.”
If you were hoping for one crazy announcement to come from this list, Boyes doesn’t believe it will happen “because we’re doing a lot of different things that are gonna make pockets of people happy.” He added:
There’s not like one thing that’s gonna make everyone’s mind explode. The key is to bring people that are fans of certain content great stuff. So if people are fans of Japanese content, you can imagine that’s a place we’re putting a lot of effort into. People who are fans of the Vita, you can imagine we’re putting lots of effort into that. Even with PS4, right, people who weren’t necessarily planning on content, or whether there’s a PC game we think should come over. There’s a lot of things that are happening in that space…
I would say in the next year’s time, if you’re a fan of Japanese games, if you’re a fan of Vita, then hopefully we’ll have a little treat for you.
As they were going about building the list, “there was a massive amount of requests for all kinds of huge IPs that are big in Japan. And those are the ones we’re going after, based on the popularity of the requests, so you can imagine there’s lots of… whatever games I say, [people are] gonna be like ‘Ahh, it’s coming!'”
Some games on that list, as Boyes puts it, are Final Fantasy Typo-0 and Genso Suikoden Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki for PSP, and they get “a ton of requests for Yakuza“ and “a ton of requests for Shenmue.” Boyes also said:
You could imagine that every piece of content that’s come to those platforms over in Japan, we’re looking at bringing over. It’s also a balance of like, is it gonna be commercially viable if there isn’t some sort of HD remix, should it come just as the native version, should we port it up? And so those are conversations, again—I worked at Capcom, now I work with Sony, so this is my second Japanese company. It’s about trust. And it takes a long time to have those conversations and make sure everyone feels comfortable, especially ’cause it’s like, we haven’t released it before in America, how’s it gonna do and stuff like that.
So it’s a long process. But I’m very hopeful. The whole reason we started the group is to bring great content that you love back over here.
Which games did you request to be put on the list? Let us know in the comments below.
