Sony will have “at least one, if not a few announcements” from its Third-Party Production team “within the next six months,” according to Sony publisher and developer relations VP Adam Boyes.
The Third-Party Production team was first formed earlier this year, when Sony announced it was working with Gearbox to port Borderlands 2 to PS Vita. It’s a team formed to work with third-party developers to bring games to PlayStation platforms, or localize content that would otherwise not be released in the west.
Speaking to Kotaku at today’s PlayStation 4 review event in New York, Boyes said the team is “doing a lot of different things that are gonna make pockets of people happy.
“I would say in the next year’s time, if you’re a fan of Japanese games, if you’re a fan of Vita, then hopefully we’ll have a little treat for you.”
Boyes continued, “There’s not like one thing that’s gonna make everyone’s mind explode. The key is to bring people that are fans of certain content great stuff. So if people are fans of Japanese content, you can imagine that’s a place we’re putting a lot of effort into. People who are fans of the Vita, you can imagine we’re putting lots of effort into that. Even with PS4, right, people who weren’t necessarily planning on content, or whether there’s a PC game we think should come over. There’s a lot of things that are happening in that space.”
The most popular game requests, according to Boyes, include Yakuza and Shenmue. Final Fantasy Type-0 is there, too. (“It’s building the list,” according to Boyes.) These are games that PlayStation fans have been tweeting Third-Party Production boss Gio Corsi since August.
“Like everything that people have tweeted Gio, literally we have a person that compiles those lists and prioritizes based on how many requests we’ve gotten,” Boyes said. “And I think to date there’s well over 10,000 mentions across like forum threads and stuff like that. So those are the ones we’re focused on.”
When it comes to Japanese games, Sony isn’t limiting their outlook to PS Vita or PlayStation 4. PSP and PlayStation 3 games are also being considered. But with the possibility of a high-def update or up-port.
“You could imagine that every piece of content that’s come to those platforms over in Japan, we’re looking at bringing over,” Boyes said. “It’s also a balance of like, is it gonna be commercially viable if there isn’t some sort of HD remix, should it come just as the native version, should we port it up?”
A release date for Borderlands 2 on PS Vita, the Third-Party Production team’s first project, has not yet been set.