Well, I certainly didn’t expect this to kick off the new year; while some games are limiting their releases to one storefront, Quantic Dream has decided to do the opposite and bring its future games to every platform it revealed in an interview with VentureBeat.
Formerly a Sony Computer Entertainment first-party developer, they released a pair of great exclusives (Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain) and a mediocre one (Beyond: Two Souls) across the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Now, they appear to taking a step into the larger console market with the help of a Chinese internet company, Netease, who also invested $100 million into Bungie for non-Destiny games, and is also one of Blizzard’s bigger partners. The company has bought a minority stake in Quantic Dream “to support the studio’s vision of becoming a global, multi-franchise entertainment company, and to develop advanced technologies and games for the future.”
In other words, Quantic Dream will still be working with Sony, their games will just be available to a wider audience. When asked, Guillaume de Foundaumiere, the CEO of Quantic Dream, says that “[they] will continue to work on PlayStation, which is a platform we love…but we will also consider other platforms, as we want to make our creations accessible to as many gamers as possible.”
For anyone concerned that the interactive storytelling David Cage and his development team are known for could be set aside, don’t be. He assured everyone that while they are expanding the platforms the games are released on, they will “keep working on projects that are ambitious and original, building on the genre [they] pioneered, and that [they] will continue to develop.”
In the interview David Cage gave a prediction, and explained where he views Quantic Dream’s place in that future, saying, “the landscape of the gaming industry will go through major evolutions in the coming years, with new hardware to come, new business models to explore and new ways of playing to invent.” He goes on to state that they “want Quantic Dream to take a key role in this exciting future.”
Whether their previous games will remain exclusive to the PlayStation systems or not, this is good news for fans of games that attempt to try something different, and not-so-good news for Sony—they just lost one of the more prominent developers from their stable. Fortunately, the fact that they will continue to release games on PlayStation platforms hints at no enmity between the two companies.
As for their next title, David Cage responded that it was too early to reveal anything about it, but did tease that the company is working on a new game engine that will support multiple platforms, and that this engine is “even more impressive than anything we have done before.”
How do you feel about console exclusives? Did you ever want to play Quantic Dream’s games but didn’t own a PlayStation? Let us know in the comments!
Sources: Gamespot, ArsTechnica
