Jim Ryan: 'Nurturing Creative Talent is Not as Simple as Throwing Money at it' - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 November 2021 / 3,139 Views
PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan in an interview with Stephen Totilo talked about how the company has improved the release schedule first-party games, however, when it comes to growing its creative talent it isn't something Sony can just throw money at.
"In terms of areas we have improved, I'd call out the delivery schedule for PlayStation Studios games," Ryan said. "Nurturing creative talent is not as simple as throwing money at it. You also must give them the freedom to be creative, to take risks and come up with new ideas.
"Just look at Ghost of Tsushima from Sucker Punch. This was not the game we thought they were going to make, but we are not overly rigid or corporate with our talent. We want them to use our hardware as their creative palette."
Ryan added that the output of first-party games for the PlayStation 4 was good, however, the majority of those games did not release until the second half of the console's cycle.
"Yes, the output during the PS4 cycle was excellent, but the great majority of those games came in the second half of the cycle," he said. "We made a conscious effort to improve on that this time around, and what you’ve seen thus far shows that we've certainly made progress. In just a few months since the launch of PS5, we’ve released incredible games and have so much more in the pipeline.
"And developers are really just getting started taking advantage of the technology in PS5, I can’t wait to see what the PlayStation Studios and our third-party partners create for PS5.
"If games like Spider-Man Miles Morales, Returnal, and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart are examples of what they can achieve in the first six months of PS5, imagine what we will see in year two or three."
The PlayStation 5 has sold over nine million units worldwide, according to VGChartz estimates through June 5, 2021. The PS5 is tracking ahead of the PS4.
As as I was going over some recent interviews, I thought people might like to see the full answer Jim Ryan gave me about lessons learned from prior PlayStation generations and how they're being applied to the PS5
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo) June 18, 2021
Some of this ran on Axios. Consider the rest a Twitter exclusive! pic.twitter.com/Z1M94cWtkS
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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This is obvious but till worth mentioning, so yeah. Wise words.
The freedom PlayStation studio's have is pretty big compared to other studio's. Sony killed of many great IP's and gave their studio's the opportunity to work on something else.
u r right Jim.
I'm sure he's just speaking from his point of view. However, I can't help but think this is a subtle dig at Microsoft and what they're doing over there. I mean what he (Jim) said isn't wrong, but you know....
The fact that he seemed to be answering specific questions about Sony during his long tenure
and the way he framed the answer around Sony rather than the industry about how spending by itself doesn't add to creativity and nurture talent the way allowing creative freedom does and then used the Ghost of Tsushima as an example of something they never expected given Sucker Punch's previous game styles gives me the impression that he was trying to explain Sony's philosophy rather than a dig at MS.
That's what I said,
Sony doesn't buy company straight off the bat,
They help other studios and giving them funds and not choking them to death like EA did with visceral games, (r.i.p)
Sony starts a relationship and supports them and then purchasing them once they have proven themselves unlike Microsoft being dickheads just buying company's left right and center just because they can,
Doesn't mean they bought amazing studios,
They need to start a relationship from ground zero not like Bethesda which they already established themselves.
It's so messed up how MS forcefully buys up these developers! There is only one right way to do it, and it's the Sony way! /s
Shots fired
Jim Ryan is a flog....
I guess throwing money at 3rd parties to ensure temporary exclusivity appears to be really simple. We can see they have been "nurturing" Square Enix and Atlus quite well.
Jealous much?
And yet Cyrberpunk is a great game. Not running well on old hardware does not make it a bad game.
I think everyone expected a lot more from Cyberpunk. It was very disappointing.
Expectations failed due to the unpolished and glitchy mess it released as. The actual game is quite good.
Downvotes really??
It was a glitchy unfinished mess that ran terrible on old hardware, fact.
The game itself is very good not accounting for that.
CDPR promised thousands of NPCs "living their life" reacting to the time cycle in a "most believable city in any open world to date". They overpromised and didn't deliver. The game being good or bad is not really the issue here.
Over promising features would be a minor issue compared to CP's main issues and that it launched as a technical mess. If it launched as a polished game it would have be quite the opposite in its reception.
I would suggest having read the interview who's questions centre around
Sony rather than the Industry by way of asking how someone like Jim Ryan with his long tenure has seen Sony's development attitudes change over his time at Sony means, the answers are specific to the line of questioning so comparisons referencing the answers to approaches taken by MS and Cyberpunk are based on broad generalisations of the subject matter rather than anything specific to his answers.
PS, While I see the Cyberpunk connection to this article being only of the most general kind. I will gives my worthless thoughts about the game
My take is if I'm scoring Cyberpunk and judging using the criteria that a game is based on the sum of all it's parts, then Cyberpunk isn't a great game .
Having said that from a more subjective viewpoint just because its technical shortcomings are well known and can be quantified it doesn't make for an unarguable case so it shouldn't be seen as an excuse to pretend that all subjectivity suddenly moved from those with negative views to the opposite side and in doing so it somehow
made their opinions based on their game experience no longer valid .
I'm waiting for the ps5 version to release. but unsur eif i should get it. Does the game offer any kind of gameplay mechanics not seen before?
It was marketed as the masterpiece of the century, not just a good or great game that doesn't innovate in any way.
What game did innovate that year when Cyberpunk launched?
Did I say I think another game innovated that year? Not every year we get a truly innovative game, that influences other games.
So whats your point exactly? Majority of games are marketed to be masterpieces, that's what marketing is. To convince gullible people into buying their product.
My point is, they lied about pretty much everything. All games are being portrayed as masterpieces during marketing, but almost never is the marketing such an elaborate lying campain of these proportions.
If the game was bug free, it quite possibly could be a masterpiece. Majority of its criticism came from its buggy launch across all platforms.
Doesn't run well on modern hardware either though...
I whole heartedly agree with this 100%
