While Ready at Dawn has established itself as the premiere PSP development team, it recently sent back all of its devkits back to Sony so that it can move to new projects on other systems.
Joystiq spoke with Ready at Dawn's president, Didier Malenfant, to see why they left Sony's handheld. According to Malenfant, piracy was not a reason. "We sold over 2.3 millions copies of
Daxter and are on track to beat that with
Chains of Olympus so we're pretty happy with our sales," he responded. "Could we sell more games if piracy was non-existent? Maybe. But we don't target the market that could be, we target the market that is."
He adds, "Good games sell. Who would have thought?"
It seems the team is simply looking to do more on another platform, and try something new. They've seemingly pushed the PSP to its limit, and they can work their magic on other platforms. "We feel like we've done everything we wanted to do with the PSP," admitted the exec. "We have new projects on other platforms and we like to focus on one thing at a time."
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
6-11-2008 @ 7:12PM
andwhyisit said...
The dumb internet mob has already overreacted.
6-11-2008 @ 7:10PM
andwhyisit said...
Piracy didn't make RaD leave PSP development, they announced that they were going to leave PSP development even before GoW:CoO was even released.
This article:
http://www.pspfanboy.com/2007/12/12/god-of-war-may-be-the-last-psp-game-from-ready-at-dawn/
came long before this article:
http://www.pspfanboy.com/2008/02/11/ready-at-dawn-staff-gets-wasted-as-god-of-war-goes-gold/
I swear no-one looks at the facts anymore.
They are telling the truth, piracy was not the reason they left.
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6-11-2008 @ 8:04PM
Jeremy said...
Well, at any rate, something has killed the PSP. I was looking for World Championship Cards today, only to find the PSP section in Best Buy is the size of a refrigerator.
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6-11-2008 @ 8:22PM
bryansurvive said...
yea but the articule states they deny it was. which im sure it wasn't because god of war 2 sold over 2 mill copies which im sure CoO will beat.
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6-12-2008 @ 12:11PM
Kade Storm said...
To Zippon:
. . .and you can bet YOUR life that those few games would mean shit on the market scale. A pirate in the third-world will never 'buy' games on that scale anyway? Wanna'know why? Money in that volume doesn't exist. To you, thirty-something dollars is a little around two nights out to the pub. To a -local- with twice your qualifications and a solid job and pay--relative to the economy of Thailand--that's almost 1/3rd of his monthly sallary.
Pirates aren't ONLY bovine 'dicks' abusing the luxuries of a good life with an ever inflating economy.
Sheesh.
And why wouldn't they blame piracy? What? Will that be unPC! You guys are a bloody joke for attributing such a statement to PR. There is no piracy sympathising camp, or the f****** Respect for Piracy Association that will slam these companies for slamming an act that is literally digital theft. Sometimes, just sometimes, they just state the truth. And if we are to dispute everything that is written, then I am sure we can dispute and cry 'false'to everything each of you write because lets face it, a comment-drone on an internet-blog is only spreading what he/she has been reading on other websites.
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6-12-2008 @ 1:50PM
bryansurvive said...
so kade storm
does this mean your just spreading what you read somewhere else?
come to think about it. the only other gaming site i go on is that g4 site which is rare.
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6-13-2008 @ 12:56PM
noc said...
Why do some of you still deny piracy as being a factor of the PSP's current state? Is it really not obvious enough that devs don't want to pitch in the time, money and effort for a system who's software is so easily pirated? And no, don't start bringing up dreamcast because it's not even alive at this point. It may be true that games that are on the bottom of the line sales are not affected as much by piracy, since ppl probably weren't going to buy them anyway. But look at the top of the line games being pirated like crazy. There's no "testing out" GoW:CoO, the game had a load of high ratings. People weren't testing it to try it to see if they would like it and then buy it later, they simply weren't going to buy it. Especially since it was short enough to finish in 1 day. Would you want to work your ass off to bring out a high quality game to find out you were cheated because you didn't make it on another system?
Sure, it wasn't RaD's main reason to leave the PSP as they've decided a while ago that they were moving on... but that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't have piracy in mind. They probably figured, hey, maybe there's more in the 360 or ps3 market to target. Let our next goal be to push for another system's limit AND know that it'll be worth it in the long run. Cuz that will be /win.
RaD did their job and they did it well, and I hope other devs will try to carry the torch. Too bad we have a drought coming, PSP just needs a steady lineup with faithful developers, unlike Ubisoft, to put out games that will up the PSP's reputation. Really, they need to start trying.
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