Family Titles a Neglected Genre, Says Sony

Expect lots of family-friendly titles on PS3 this Christmas.

According to Sony Worldwide Studios president, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony will be concentrating on “family-friendly” titles and relying on third party studios to deliver “big core games,” this Christmas.

“We’d love to have multi-million sellers for the holiday,” he said. “But each title needs time to develop, especially new IP like The Last of Us, God of War has always come out in March, so that’s a natural time to aim at.”

“Our strategy for Christmas is to go big on family-friendly titles,” he continued. “This is a neglected genre for the PlayStation 3, but as it matures, I think it’s really important to have these games on the platform. I think we have a great lineup this holiday to complement third parties’ big core games.”

As CVG pointed out, Yoshida’s comments sound odd taken alongside those made by Sony’s head of digital games, Jack Buser, who last month criticized Microsoft and Nintendo for neglecting core gamers at E3.

“Some of our competitors, seemingly, are losing the plot, forgetting what built this industry,” he said. “It was the gamer… We are for the gamer first and foremost. Everything we do at PlayStation, we ask ourselves first, ‘What’s right for the gamer?'”

Personally, I’ve always taken the distinction between “core” and “casual” – or in this case “family-friendly” – with a grain of salt. What matters to me is whether or not the games Sony releases this holiday season are good, not which demographic distinction they fall into. Of course, I’m not a parent desperately trying to find a gaming gift for a young child that doesn’t involve horrific violence, foul language, sexualized characters or all of the above.

Source: Game Informer Via Gaming Everything