The appearance of Braid and The Witness developer Jonathan Blow at Sony’s PS4 reveal was one of its biggest surprises. Had Sony charmed one of the most outspoken and demandingly independent developers around? We asked him about his opinion of PS4’s hardware, Sony and Microsoft’s changing attitudes to indies and his vision for the next generation.
You’ve said that you like the idea of The Witness being on console. Why is that?
Part of it is making sure that everyone who wants to play the game can. We’re trying to get a spectrum of players – we’re doing PC, I do most of my playing on PC now. It’s what I’ve gravitated to. We’re doing iOS – it’s a really nice game for touch interfaces and iOS is the majority of touch devices right now. We’ll also support touch on PC, but there aren’t that many out there right now.
But a lot of people still play games on console, and, well, if we want them to play the game, we want to be there. It’s a smart business decision, maybe. But how can we predict it? Nobody can really know what is going to happen with next-generation consoles. There’s speculation that nobody’s going to buy them, while some think they’re going to be bigger than the last generation. I really don’t know. But it seems to be a good idea to be there. PS4 seemed like the best one to lead on. We naturally started developing on it late last year and we’re very happy with that decision. When the choice came to announce ourselves as a launch title for PS4 we went for it because it was what we were already doing.
Sony came to you about being in the presentation?
Yeah, it was a surprise to us, and we only found out a short time before the presentation!
How long before?
I probably shouldn’t say, but it wasn’t very long. We put that trailer together very quickly, and we worked very hard on the game to make it presentable. It was basically a surprise – you think about what kind of shows they are and who’s in them. Every other game – maybe not the Media Molecule one, I don’t know – surely had a budget over $100 million. Some of those games have $500-600 million budgets; maybe just one. That a tiny game like ours being in that group, I wasn’t even considering it could be a possibility, so that was interesting.
It seemed to carry a careful message, that Sony had tamed Jon Blow, the outspoken developer who makes games on his terms.
Yeah, they never said anything that explicitly but I do think they realise that downloadable games are going to be bigger than they ever have been, and I think they realise that part of success in that area is having developers who are making the most interesting games want to be on their platform. For that to be the case when they’re shipping the console, they’re going to have to do a lot more than just getting an independent developer onstage, right, but hopefully they’ll do that. I’m having a good time working with them so far – I’m optimistic but you can only wait and see how things happen.
Braid and The Witness developer Jonathan Blow.
Sony’s better supporting independent developers with self-publishing – have you seen much change in its attitudes?
I haven’t had that much contact in the past – when we released Braid on PS3, it was another developer that did the port and publishing. I heard they’re simplifying certain aspects of certification, I don’t know. Porting The Witness over now, we’re not actually in the part of development when we would be interacting with Sony yet.
It was easy to assume that you’d agreed to go on stage because you knew the terms of business, which you’ve complained about in the past for consoles, were better.
Yeah, there were a lot of reasons why it was a good choice. Some were technical – we haven’t officially been disclosed on Microsoft’s next console, but we do see the same leaks as everyone else has, and they seem plausible. To me they talk about a console that is not strictly about games. It’s trying to be the centre of the living room device, which is fine and maybe it’s the right thing for Microsoft to do, business-wise. I don’t know; I actually don’t think it is, but they’ve certainly thought about it more than me!
As a place to put the best, highest performing version of our game on, it doesn’t seem as good a choice. And, you know, I’ve had a bad time working with Microsoft in the past. Maybe not super bad, but a moderately bad time in terms of business relationships. Other developers who are friends of mine have had a horrible time, so the idea of signing up again with Microsoft isn’t something I’d have ruled out, but there’s a certain amount of dread I have about doing that again. I don’t have that with Sony. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out to be just as bad at the end! But I don’t think so. The people we’re talking to on a daily basis there are just really good people, and we’re happy to work with them. We’ll see how it goes.
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