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Sony did not expect the PlayStation 4 to sell as well as it is, and this has caused a few problems.
That’s according to the publisher’s head of worldwide studios, Shuhei Yoshida, who – speaking to Eurogamer – says that the console is currently tracking ahead of its internal predictions.
Yoshida also believes that the console outperforming its expectations is at least partially responsible for some of the errors seen in the release of DriveClub last year.
That game was originally meant to be a launch title, hitting shelves in November 2013, but was delayed until October 2014. Even with that setback, the game launched with a slew of issues, and the free PlayStation Plus version of the game was pushed back until June of this year.
We weren’t expecting this many people would buy a PlayStation 4, and have PlayStation Plus membership," Yoshidasaid.
Because [DriveClub] was originally titled for the launch of the system, the number of potential people to download for free for the PS Plus version would be much smaller than two years after the launch. We realised the daunting task of supporting potentially millions and millions of people to download and play. The team needed to go back to the drawing board and re-engineer the server-side.”
This success is also to blame for the lacklustre perception surrounding PS4’s first-party line-up, which pales in comparison to its third-party roster.
"Typically – it’s ironic in a sense, when a platform’s doing really well, studio side kind of struggles,"Yoshidaexplained.
"It probably has some relationship to these two things. When a platform’s doing well, third-parties support it more. So from a pure software standpoint, there’ll be more competition. When the platform’s not doing so well, our games become more prominent, and we get larger market share within the same platform. Because we continue to support the PS3, in the launch year of the PS4 we had The Last of Us and Gran Turismo 6 and Beyond and so on, many games, we were still working hard. We’re just head-down, focussed on delivering the games for the near future. We’re happy with how it’s going, and we’re excited about welcoming PlayStation VR. From a delivering games standpoint, we have work to do. People constantly ask us for the big exclusive triple-A games."
