While the name Sebastien Rubens isn’t as recognizable as John Koller, he is a former SCEE employee from the Technology Group division at Sony. Rubens recently ventured out on his own to start Anozor, a small development team that has created downloadable content for the PlayStation Portable, primarily, No Gravity. Now that Rubens is outside of Sony walls, however, he’s taking this opportunity to let his feelings be known about the portable handheld device and the way SCEE handled third-party support, including the submission process and SDK of games.
“There’s always room for improvement in everything, but if you look at thirdparty relations in the US, they’re a little more integrated than in Europe,” he told Edge Online. “The second step is to have a better SDK – iPhone’s is better. You could make things a lot easier to use, and I come from the software engineering side."
“After that it’s a problem of the market and deciding what it wants, including prices for downloadable games, so people know what kind of games to make – in other words, not a GTA, even if PSP is technically capable of running it, because the economics don’t make it worth it. And in the submission process, they’re a bit too slow to move.
“I’m not the only one; don’t get me wrong here,” he continues. “Other developers can be very heavy on it.”
Of course, all of this talk comes with the recent and widely reported rumored redesign of the PlayStation Portable, which media and fans of the device expect to hit retail shelves before the end of 2009. Fortunately, as more and more people purchase gadgets like the iPhone and iPhone Touch, it’s easier to see how Apple involves its third-party components and SDK offering in order to make things smoother for its handheld devices.
Thankfully, the future looks strong for the PSP, which has seen a large increase in sales as of late, so we’ll have to watch this situation play itself out.