Sony is less than a handful of days away from introducing what many expect to be the PS4, but it looks like the developer who created one of the most successful games on the PS4's preceding platform will be heading in another direction.
According to a report from GamesIndustry on Thursday, ThatGameCompany founder Jenova Chen talked about their upcoming goal for their next game and how money affects many aspects of their business.
"The current stage of our goal is to create a game that's actually going to make a commercial success, that's actually going to make the publishers or investors say, 'There's a huge market there. We should put money into seriously developing these high quality games.'
"They say, 'Wherever we go to find jobs, people always say you need to focus on how to trap the player, keep them playing the game, get them addicted to it, how can you increase the return of investment, make them pay more money.' And that's not the job they want.
"The money guy hasn't seen any potential. They are not convinced it's worth the money to put in all this hard work and effort to make something very emotional and artistic. They don't see the money there," Chen said.
Chen then discussed the fact that business is drifting toward free-to-play and he commented on the effect of Kickstarter.
"This is definitely where the money is flowing. I think free-to-play is both exciting and also really dangerous. So we're still testing out what will go there.
"How are you going to make people feel emotion when they're constantly on guard that you're manipulating them to make money? That's something I'm excited to look into, but I can't commit and say it's definitely going to be free or definitely going to be mobile.
"The other thing is I think most of the very successful Kickstarters are by veteran celebrity developers who made these games people in their 30s and 40s used to love.
"They're the people who have loads of money to donate. And I'm thinking that most of the people who played our games are teenagers and college students. How much money are they going to have to donate? So I think it's not my time yet," Chen said.
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