Tim Schafer thinks it's a good idea for console developers like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to open more lines of communication with the studios who develop games on their platforms.
Speaking to OXM, the maker of Psychonauts and founder of Double Fine said that he believes Sony done right by developers with the PlayStation 4 by actively soliciting feedback from them. Sony had previously kept game developers at arm's length when it was developing the PlayStation 3—a strategy that cost the PS3 early in its race against the Xbox 360, and one that Microsoft apparently seems to be applying to its next-generation console, codenamed Durango.
"This is one of the first times where we've been approached by a platform holder like Sony and asked, 'first, what do you guys want from this new box? We have this new feature, what could you do with it?'" he said. "We've already got some guys playing with some of the new features to see what we can do with it."
Schafer praised Sony for taking the initiative to reach out to smaller studios like Double Fine and employing what he says is a winning strategy to winning companies like his over.
"It's not that hard to win over developers because all we want is to be treated with just a little bit of reason," Schafer said. "Often you just get told the most unreasonable, crazy things and you're like 'really? That's how you're going to treat us?'
"Just doing things like letting us patch our games when we want to, put our games on sale and release our games in territories that they should be released in – just doing a few things like that can make a developer very enamored of you."
