Ready at Dawn, the development studio behind two of the most popular titles for the Playstation Portable, may be returning to PSP development.
The studio famously got out of the PSP-development business last year, returning their development kits to Sony and moving on to other things. But John Koller, director of hardware marketing for Sony Computer Entertainment of America, says that Sony Computer Entertainment have been in talks with the studio about returning to the PSP.
"Ready at Dawn is a fantastic developer, they did God of War: Chains of Olympus and Daxter," he said. "The conversations with them continue.
"Don't give up on Ready at Dawn yet."
Koller said that a lot of studios who were reluctant to develop for the Playstation Portable in 2006 have noticed the surge in PSP sales with the release of the PSP 2000 model. That, he says, explains the impressive slate of games announced this week for the portable.
"In mid 2006 the hardware had seen a bit of a bottoming out, a lot of publishers decided to reallocate their resources," he said. "In 2007 the PSP 2000 came out and we saw a big increase in sales. When we met with developers in 2008 they said, 'How can we get back into the PSP?'"
With the long development window, those games are just now starting to hit the console.
Sony also sat down with developers and talked to them about stream lining costs to make game development and marketing for the PSP more cost effective.
"We went in with a number of ideas and really laid it out," he said. "We had recommendations about franchises that made a lot of sense for the PSP."