Braid creator Jonathan Blow has described the nature of his relationship with Sony and why The Witness will be a PlayStation 4 exclusive for the foreseeable future.
Speaking in an interview with Kotaku, Blow professed that the timed exclusivity agreement he signed with Sony has absolutely no money involved and is an arbitrary legitimization of an excellent working relationship. "The Wii U still has pretty low system specs, so it came down to a choice between the next Microsoft console or the next Sony console," he explained. "I don’t have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, and haven’t been disclosed on their next console, but all our technical people like the PS4 specs a lot more than the leaked Durango specs . . . So we just found ourselves doing a PS4 port. And once we are doing that, it is not practical for us also to think about another console port."
"We were going to be a de facto console exclusive for Sony no matter what."
Blow’s reveal of The Witness at Sony’s PlayStation Meeting marked another landmark in PlayStation’s long history of supporting indie devs with PlayStation Network’s open ecosystem. It’s important to note that Blow’s agreement with Sony does not prevent his company from releasing The Witness on iOS and PC, but definitive plans don’t exist for either platform yet.
Check out the debut trailer of The Witness, then sound off with your thoughts in the comments below. Is having an indie launch game lined up a good sign for creativity on PS4 moving forward?