Developer Ready at Dawn has turned its back on Sony's handheld, with a short post on the company's website confirming that the studio is "now officially done with PSP development." Ready at Dawn is best recognized for two of the PSP's more landmark titles, namely Daxter and last year's God of War: Chains of Olympus, though the company's recent success in bringing Capcom's Okami to the Wii may have more than a little to do with the dev's shifting priorities.
Calling the decision "the end of an era," the move has an air of finality about it, with Ready at Dawn packing up all of its PSP dev kits and sending them back from whence they came. The news echoes comments from Ready at Dawn's Ru Weerasuriya earlier this year, with the Chains of Olympus director noting back in March that "our work on the PSP has come to an end." As for what the devs have in store for us next, your guess is as good as ours, though we've dispatched Joystiq ninjas to the Santa Ana-based studio for more information.
[Via Aeropause]













(Page 1) Reader Comments
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The only thing about the controls is the motion gesture that you do with the nunchuck, but is not a really necesary attack.
Everything else is good. You still use analog stick to move the character, and buttons for attacks.
This is topic has already been talked about, here is a summary of some of the problems with it...
IGN
"The nunchuk-mapped dodge move, for instance, feels much worse..."
http://wii.ign.com/articles/865/865958p3.html
1up
"Now, too many of those same actions take more tries than they should; drawing simple horizontal lines can cause headaches..."
http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3167381&p=44
Gamespot
"Standard reflectors, on the other hand, may cause you frustration at first, because you can't string attacks together simply by incessantly flinging your remote forward and back...."
http://www.gamespot.com/wii/action/okami/review.html
So yes, I would call that a mediocre port, because in THIS case, the motion sensing and IR pointer capabilities of the Wii should have made the game 10 times better...
Forgot thats how the internet works.
If you do a fast short stroke, even if it waves a little, it recognizes it as a straight line. I haven't used the Z button at all...
My problem comes when I draw circles...
As for linking attacks with the reflectors, it's just a rhythm thing. Once you get the rhythm down it's a piece of cake... isn't that why you practice them in the dojo before being able to take advantage of the move?
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....The PS2 had TWO analogs.
RAD had already stated when making GoW that were going to shift all focus toward other un-named projects...they just wanted to prove that they could make a killer psp app, they did.
Don't see what the problem is.
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I'm not sure that sending ninjas to kill all the staff of Ready at Dawn is actually the best way to pry their secrets loose. In fact, it might be the best way to ensure that their lips never loose their secrets.
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(and if they have someone point me to it, i cant see every article on the net)
Note the comment says that Sony paid Insomniac for the development of Resistance to offset crappy sales of the launch game. But that may not be true, as sales have not been crappy. It's sold a lot of copies now, because Sony did a ton of advertising for them and bundled a lot of copies.
Perhaps Ted Price was not paid off up front on Resistance, but just took the long view, taking a hit on a game that sold a "mere" 2.5 million copies so far knowing Sony would make it up to them in the future with more strong comarketing and bundles for their future games.
Does Sony really have no financial interest in Insomniac? Well, I dunno, as a private company (Insomniac) we have no way to be sure. But neither Sony nor Insomniac has said anything in public to the contrary. (My friend at SCEA told me privately otherwise, but I'm starting to think he's wrong, he has been before.)
Okami has sold like crap on Wii, and it doesn't play all that well either.
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Ready at Down no support for PSP
Capcom no more PSP games
Ubisoft no games at all
Tecmo no games
Konami limited support
EA has publically stated less upport
and SONY continues to do nothing
SONY even cancled Grand Turismo themselves for their own PSP.
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But I do agree about Sony doing nothing, hell, even developers have mentioned it, they love the damn hardware (except Itagaki) but that until Sony is cleared about what they want to do with the PSP their support will be limited to none...sad indeed
Capcom still has PSP games in the pipe and is even working to throw Remote Play into their PSN titles.
Ubisoft was... well hell, when was Ubisoft ever behind PSP? Seriously, I fail to understand how the tactics they used on Wii is a huge fucking crime and "they deserve to suffer" but take those same tactics and apply them to PSP and somehow Ubisoft was a patron saint of the console. Ubisoft was every inch as lazy as EA on PSP and suffered because of it. I could buy their bullshit if their biggest titles on the console we're months old PoP ports and Splinter Cell runoffs.
Tecmo isn't cranking the games out anywhere. I fail to see their inability to launch on PSP as an indication of failure when all other systems remain equally barren of Tecmo releases.
Konami has limited support? Aside from Castlevania and the Metal Gear series (which, incidently, has another chapter coming in the form of Portable Ops 2 and a RUMORED AC!D 3), I don't recall much from Konami on the system either.
EA's strategy on the console is the same as before. Port what we can, don't worry about quality. Is it coincidence that EA managed to ship Madden for two years in a row with a fatal system crashing bug in the MAIN MODE of the fucking game? Meanwhile they were expecting full price for their defective ports. $50 for madden on PSP? Yeah, okay, I'll get right on that. Truth be told, I threw my support behind EA when they actually did unique things on the console like Burnout (I know, it only collected previous stages but so did Ridge Racer and I loved that game so fair's fair) and.. well, Burnout. Nothing else put out on PSP by EA is worth mentioning.
So when most companies are being lazy as fuck on PSP, why is it suddenly Sony's responsibility to fix the situation? Sony is doing what they should, developing games on the console and promoting excellent titles. I'm not saying they were blameless in this issue because that simply isn't true. Everywhere Sony tried to focus PSP, it failed. And so Sony is letting the system do it's own thing which leaves some people unhappy. But if you're NOT finding games to buy on the system, you're NOT looking. For every Ubisoft dropped port on the system, that's shelf space for an Atlus translation. For every EA Sports title that doesn't make it this year, that's a spot for another NIS title.
Nintendo probably felt the same way with the N64 and their success of the NES/SNES and Sony managed to leap ahead and take the advantage such as getting FF7 on their console when the previous games were all on Nintendo's systems.
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Sony develops or co-developers exclusive IPs. If you own the IP, you know it won't end up on a different platform.
I have no idea where you get the idea that MS is doing a great job on exclusives. The general consensus by gaming pundits is that 360 has a fairly bleak future for exclusives right now. Gears being a very notable exception.
Are you on drugs or something? Sony has always relied on 3rd party games, and keeping a stranglehold on them via exclusive deals(GTA4, VC, SA comes to mind), to push their systems
Sony didn't buy exclusivity for the GTA games. They were exclusive because Sony would give co-marketing for them if they were exclusive, and they figured giving up the miniscule number of sales from Xbox would be more than made up with Sony backing their games with comarketing. They were very right, by the way.
In what world is GTA4 exclusive to Sony? Who is the one on crack here?
Look at the PS3 exclusives Sony has paid for so far:
Ratchet & Clank
Resistance
Lair
Heavenly Sword
Eye of Judgement
GT5P
All of those are Sony owned IPs. They will never appear on another platform.
On PS2, Sony got a lot of "natural" exclusives where the developer didn't feel the need to develop for other platforms, especially when giving Sony a timed exclusive would net valuable comarketing. On PS3, Sony isn't as dominant, so they have relied primarily on exclusives they own the IP for, not bought exclusives (that usually turn into only timed exclusives).
They are also underwhelming titles, I'm sure I could name a lot of mediocre selling/rated Microsoft only titles as well.
Resistance has sold a "mere" 2.5M so far. The other two probably have topped over 10M in total sales.
What's mediocre mean in your world?
Anyway, this isn't a pissing contest about game quality. I was explaining the difference in how Sony and MS are getting exclusives right now.
This method when used by MS produced MS' one truly breakout 3rd party exclusive for 360, Gears of War. So I think even MS probably thinks the method has merit.
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"but have you taken a look at the software sales?"
Yes I have, and unlike you had previously mentioned about its software sales lagging behind others in Japan, well, the PSP has the top spot...
Im starting to believe that you don't even have one...
You obviously haven't.
I mean don't get me wrong, go off and do other things, but couldn't you just say "our next game is going to be on console X"?
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"We're done with your hardware until it becomes profitable"
It's no different than when major retailers were threatening to remove the system from their shelves, it sparked Sony to fix the problem.
I must have missed that memo, but as far as I knew, all they threatened to was to remove UMDs....
"It's to send the following message to Sony.
"We're done with your hardware until it becomes profitable""
what? that doesnt even make sene, Sony was the publisher of both of their games...
And no, RaD mentioned that they wanted to work on the PSP to prove what the system was capable of, from the beginning they always stated that they wanted to work on the consoles...
PiemanPieman
Actually, this article is weeks old, and they mentioned this pretty much because of the requests by fans to make more PSP games, they wanted to work on big projects for the consoles from the beginning...and the PSP games just proved that they can