Anonymous developer claims devs are abandoning Sony products

In the comments section of a February 13 post on the Gamesblog section of UK news portal Guardian Unlimited entitled "PS3: difficult stories emerge in run up to Euro launch", an anonymous UK developer writes:

I work as a games developer, and have revealed all sorts of info on this blog. I think its all been ignored though. Readers here prefer to discuss press-releases and marketing figures. Anyway, if anyone is interested to know how serious Sony's problems are, consider this. There are virtually no PSP or PS3 games being developed in the UK.

Of course, in defense of the PSP, a quick look at upcoming PSP release dates in the UK show that there's a lot of activity leading up to mid-March. Moreover, a look at Metacritic's compiled review scores for NDS games reveal that only a handful of the top games are developed outside of Japan – something that is in stark contrast with the PSP. At least 12 of the PSP top 20 are western releases.

Kieth Stuart of Gamesblog notes that it could also be argued that when it comes to handhelds, Britain has never really been a major force.

Here's the rest of the anonymous (oddly the handle he used is "MrTummy") developer's comment:

...Nintendo had sent Wiimotes that plug into Gamecube devkits to all registered developers. Instead of forking out thousands of quid to Sony for devkits that they still weren't releasing, studios were coming up with innovative Wii ideas. Instead of training coders to program the world's most complicated Cell processor, the Gamecube team just switched to the Wii.

People can believe what they want. You can trawl the web for lists of PSP or PS3 games to get excited about. The truth is that the development community is already abandoning Sony's products, just as happened in the past to the Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, GC... All that'll be propping-up the PS3 and PSP a year from now will be some sad sports and movie fodder.

Given that Team Ico of Shadow of the Colossus fame has just announced that they're working on a PS3 project, we're pretty sure that you folks have a lot to say to MrTummy.