Nippon Ichi Is Done with PS3, Moving on to PS4 and PS Vita
Nippon Ichi is making the jump to PlayStation 4 and won't be looking back — although many of its previous hits came out on PlayStation 3, it's putting development for games on the last-gen console to rest.
The Japanese development company, Nippon Ichi, has two more games set to release this year and neither of them will be coming out for PlayStation 3, which is where most of its hits were set over the years. Gematsu reports that Nippon Ichi will be taking the plunge to being devoted to PS4 and PS Vita.
Here's what Nippon President Sohei Niikawa said about going current-gen:
It's precisely because nobody else is making that big jump that we think there's value to be had in setting our sights square on PS4. As a result, we've received support from Sony and are now able to do things like put out commercials. In that respect from a promotional perspective, there are merits to going the route that we have here.
The thing is that if we were just constantly putting out games only for old hardware, we'd get outclassed pretty quickly from a technical perspective.
While this explanation makes sense, especially since Niikawa also pointed out that Nippon Ichi is a small company, the numbers are still saying otherwise. There are many games in Japan, such as Yakuza 0, that sold much better on the PlayStation 3 than the PlayStation 4 (though things are slowly shifting towards the PS4). Going multi-console does help broaden overall sales, but we've always felt that it waters-down the overall product. Thankfully, Niikawa remains adamant, saying:
[Going multi-platform is] not how progress is made and more than anything, it's just not interesting work for us. We need to be constantly challenged. There are a lot of companies taking a wait-and-see approach with this hardware transition, but if you look at it from the perspective of our customers, they're not seeing a whole lot of games coming out, which is in turn making them way to move onto new hardware. It's our job as game developers to bring that energy to life and make that market a reality.
Nevertheless, going PS4-exclusive means that games will have a much higher quality than having to hit the development median between current- and last-gen. Of course, Nippon Ichi will still be doing PS Vita games as well. Unfortunately, Niikawa did not specify whether or not his company would still continue doing 3DS, Wii and Wii U games.