X Marks the Spot

Sony's XDev team works with all its European external development partners, funding and managing titles for Sony platforms, and as helped to deliver work from Quantic Dream, Media Molecule, Sumo Digital, Ninja Theory and Relentless Software. As such, it has real insight into the evolution of European development culture, seeing first hand the downsizing of larger teams and the rise of the smaller, more nimble micro studio.

In this exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, senior director of XDev Studio Europe John Rostron discusses working with some of the most respected game developers in Europe, their influence on the creation of the PlayStation Vita, how Sony is learning from the freemium market, and how the economy has create new opportunities for talented UK developers.

Q: Can you begin with an overview of the XDev group and its role within Sony Worldwide Studios?

John Rostron: We look after every studio that isn't part of the internal group... and Media Molecule. They're an internal studio but we treat them very much like a separate entity. Basically people come to us with a pitch, or they want to set up a company, we like your idea and we invest in your company. Over a period of months we work on whatever that title will be and help bring it out. Media Molecule, Relentless Software, Supermassive Games - they were all start-ups. Supermassive was started by Pete Samuels who was at EA, and we said "look, we've got some ideas for motion games" but we couldn't find the team to do them. We had the idea but we didn't have good enough pitches back from developers. We invested in his company and he's up to 70-plus people now.

I've been at Sony for seven years and when I joined it wasn't that sort of place, it was very difficult to do things like that back then. But after the success of things like Buzz we thought "we can really go for this". Luckily Michael (Denny, head of Worldwide Studios Europe) comes from external development and he has an understanding of what it takes to get a start up off the ground and delivering what it is that a company actually wants. Prior to that we didn't have a defined way of working with an external studio and making it work for both of us. But over the past five years externally developed games are absolutely as important to Sony as the internal projects. That's a huge thing for us.

Q: How often to do you get pitched to, how many ideas are you considering a month?

John Rostron: The stream of games pitches that we get is almost constant, especially with the proliferation of handhelds. Everybody's got a great idea. If you went back three years ago it was more of a trickle, maybe two or three a month. Now it's a hundred a month, easily.

Q: What's the ratio between developers coming to you with a pitch and Sony putting out the call that you've got a project and you want to work with an external development team on it?

John Rostron: When we've got a new peripheral or when there's a new platform or a new space that we want to get into, that's when there will be a lot of internal brainstorming - about 26 producers - coming up with lots of ideas. The latest focus has been the idea of augmented reality. Novarama came up with this neat technology - having built Invisibles - it inspired us to get some ideas together. Sony embraced that innovation. We put out a call saying this is what the tech will do, we went to about 10 teams and asked them to pitch to us, let's see what will work and what won't as fun games. So we started about seven games just after E3 which we've been working on which will hopefully go out globally.

Q: Do you have that capability to just give out technology for external developers to play around with, experiment and feedback on?

John Rostron: If it's technology that we've developed with a team, we've funded and we own, then yes, we can do that as long as everyone agrees. Quite often if they come up with something special then there might be a royalty attached. It tends to be the teams that we have an exclusive relationship with that we can share that deep information with. If it's an external team that's working with a lot of different publishers then it becomes more tricky.

Q: PlayStation Vita is the big push for Sony at the moment, how has the feedback from external studios been and how long have they been working with PS Vita kits?

John Rostron: Maybe about two years. But the internal group, the production teams, some of those have been there from the start. This is the very first time that we've had a console and been really involved in its design. Right from the beginning.

Q: Shuhei Yoshida has said this to us before, that it was a really big deal for the hardware team in Japan to work hand in hand with the software developers across the globe.

John Rostron: It can be a bit laborious at times but at the end of the day we know if we get it right we're publishing on a platform that is actually awesome. It's a real incentive for us to work with those guys. Seeing some of the engineers from internal studios going to work with the teams in Japan on a ground level, and being able to feed into that, is fantastic.

The external teams loved the Vita. I'm a massive Apple fan, I've got an iPhone and iPad, and in the early days, trying to break into that market, potentially, when the Vita was very early on and we didn't quite know whether it was going to be a phone, we didn't know the final hardware platform, it was difficult. Now we know it's an out-and-out gaming machine with social connectivity, and that's been defined. With the Vita there's twin thumb sticks, you can't get that sort of responsiveness from a touch screen, so the gaming experiences will be deeper, absolutely. That's one of the things we've seen from external devs. A lot of the guys were surprised at how good it is.

Q: It's partly a communication message as well, right? Everyone is cynical of a dedicated games handheld in today's mobile and portable market, but once you get hands-on with the Vita you realise what it is, what it's for.

John Rostron: A lot of our early prototypes were on PSPs and it didn't work because there were no dual thumb sticks. We had bits of hardware where we had almost a DualShock controller augmented onto a PSP and you still don't get it, so you're trusting that it's going to come together. In early 2010, just before E3, we began getting units, maybe linked to another machine in order to work properly, but still a prototype without the proper screen, but we realised it was going to work.

Q: It must be tricky getting the message across to external teams when they're working on unfinished hardware.

John Rostron: But because we've been through this process a number of times - we went through this on PlayStation 3 - you're always working with half speed hardware and we just have to get over it. More often than not we'll be giving them a very decent piece of hardware that they love working on. And that's great to see. A lot of developers get very excited to be working on new hardware that's not finished. A lot of them hit the metal, they go straight to the chip, they love doing that. On occasion some of them can come back with thoughts and ideas about how we can improve something, especially now that we're more involved in the initial designs.

Q: Working with so many external development teams have you noticed that transition from big boxed, triple-A development houses to smaller, leaner, digitally-focused studios?

John Rostron: That's absolutely the way it's gone. There are so many more teams. So many are in that mobile space developing for an Apple platform, where you only need software, not tens of thousands of pounds worth of hardware. There are lots of people with great ideas out there and you can realise them with far less outlay. We're getting to see a lot more pitches come in because of that. Now, granted, a lot of those pitches are carbon copies of titles that have done well but every now and again we get something that is standout that you want to invest in. It's great starting point for many. We don't see many of the larger teams coming to us anymore...

Q: Presumably because there are less of them.

John Rostron: Either that or because they've been snaffled up by another publisher. We get more reward seeing a small team grow into a really great one so long as they don't lose the essence of what made them in the first place. That's something we tried to maintain with Media Molecule, they are absolutely the same company they were before we acquired them.

Q: You must be going through that with Double Eleven as well, now that they're a Sony exclusive studio.

John Rostron: It was around 2010, and Phil Gaskell from Rebel Play introduced me to the guys at Double Eleven and they're so absolutely passionate about what they are doing. They get so much out of each other, they only hire the very, very best people and engineers. That's one of the things we say, usually in development studios there's just one or two stand out guys who you know are going to drag this game from a piece of paper and a Powerpoint presentation to something that's awesome. A lot of them can be tricky to work with. Like David Cage, those people that have that vision that they work through - not that David is tricky to work with.

Q: I bet he is!

John Rostron: He's got an opinion and his team following him because they know he will absolutely deliver. And he does.

Q: But Double Eleven has got a whole team of those guys.

John Rostron: Absolutely. When we gave them LittleBigPlanet to work with they were all over it, looking at new ways to handle it. That's great to see. You might see teams that want to handle things differently, but Double Eleven wanted to rip the code to pieces, make it fit the hardware and build another game. That's a great position to be in.

Q: Are there any particular trends that you're seeing from external developers, in terms of new genres like augmented reality, that are coming to the forefront of pitches?

John Rostron: It's the mobile space. At Sony we haven't really experimented with freemium play and micro-transactions as some of the mobile development teams have, for obvious reasons. So there's a couple of unannounced internal concepts that we've got where we're looking at that whole area. Coming from console development that was a real eye-opener. The most successful companies in the mobile space define the game once it's launched. They analyse everything in infinite detail with a team of analysts on the game to figure out how it can work. They just don't build things like we do in the console space. I think there will be a trend where we try and understand a lot more of how that market works with our products.

Q: That becomes easier to you as digital formats become more and more accepted in the console space. As broadband speeds increase, as DLC becomes more normal to a traditional games model.

John Rostron: On the PlayStation Network if you compare it to Facebook we obviously don't have those numbers but that's because we haven't had a platform that you can have with you all the time. So I am really expecting to see the PlayStation Network expand and the number of users go up exponentially with the introduction of Vita. It's an interesting space, the amount of costumes that we release for LittleBigPlanet, that taps into that market and gives players things they can build into their worlds. We do see it in those instances and it keeps the community alive, it's definitely an area that you cannot neglect.

Q: Are you getting any feedback from Sony Online Entertainment, they seem to have had a massive boost by turning DC Universe Online into a freemium title?

John Rostron: They didn't do it trivially, they really thought about how they can manage that. A lot of their findings have been sent out to teams and they've done internal workshops and told us about how that whole process has worked for them. Consoles aren't going to go that way entirely of course. Look at Uncharted 3, I don't ever want that experience to go away, we want to that to grow. The Quantic Dream experiences, the Naughty Dog experiences, we want them to continue.

Q: Being in touch with so many studios are you aware of how the economy is affecting the independent developer, how it might be restricting development or promoting a business to think differently?

John Rostron: We know it's tough out there but it always is. If no one's funding your project then it doesn't matter if the economy is doing well or not. There's definitely a lot less presence in the UK from other publishers, so it's harder if people are looking to be published on a console. They have to fly out to the US to meet with the big boys. That makes it very tough for them. But then you do have the mobile space which is another opportunity. We don't really see it because the companies we work with, we fund.

One thing they do say is the labour market is massive because there's that many companies that have gone under there's absolutely no problem attracting people. Developers are able to contract a lot of people that were laid off. So instead of going through a company to outsource, there's 20 engineers you can bring in and they can earn very good money directly from their raw talent on a project. I have nothing but admiration for anybody that sets up on their own, it takes huge balls to do that sort of stuff. We're just far more open to that way of working. At one point a lot of the outsourcing work was going over to China and to Asia, but because there's this workforce a lot closer to home, who speak English as a native tongue, it's very easy to get some of those guys into a studio and working on a project for a year and a half and really grow their portfolio. We've definitely got the talent here. We don't necessarily get those huge teams anymore but you can have a nucleus of 20-30 people and augment that with another 20 or 30 people at a time and they move around from project to project.