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On relationship with Indie devs

"Sure, it could be replicated by someone else, but it can't be replicated in a corporate-style way," Rohde said. "It's not something you put on your business plan and say 'Let's go make this happen.' It's because the people--Shahid, Adam Boyes, Nick Suttner, Brian Silva, myself, Shu Yoshida--there's a genuine love there, and people feel that."

Rohde called it a "two-way love affair," and said Sony and indie developers have been seeking each other out for some time.

It's a dramatic turnaround from the early days of the PlayStation Network, when self-publishing for developers was neither common nor easy. As for what changed that, it wasn't so much a change of heart as a change of bodies.

"To be quite frank, within the SCEA walls, there's been some turnover of staff. In the past there might have been some people who were more inclined toward the corporate side of business who would manage those relationships," Rohde said.

On vita

Those are big games," Rohde said. "There's a bigger appetite for those games, perhaps, in Japan. But some of those games are also very appropriate in the Western market as well. I think Vita is a key component of that whole PlayStation ecosystem. There's a huge hunger for all the indie games you mentioned. We have tried very hard when we put out a game like Helldivers, Hohokum or something like that, we also want to bring it to Vita. In the past, in the PSP era, we would just bring it to PS3, but now we make a concerted effort to get many of those games onto Vita as well."

Performance Capture

"What you can do in terms of performance capture with the facials on characters in this generation, you can bring out emotion and it can be very believable," Rohde said. "Of course, it could in the past. I think it was very believable in a game like The Last of Us. But it took a lot more to squeeze that horsepower out. It took a lot of TLC to make that happen on the last generation. I think with new performance capture techniques, it will be easier to capture what we're seeing on the motion capture stage and getting that into a believable state the end gamer will appreciate."

"In previous generations, it was a little tougher when you couldn't quite relate to that character," Rohde said. "It felt a little more like a mannequin, it was more of a generic performance capture or not quite believable because the fidelity wasn't there. But if you go back to that specific moment in Second Son and you see genuine fear in his eyes and the expression on his face, that to me is something we know we want to do more and more of going forward in the PS4 generation

On PS3

"People are still buying PS3s," Rohde said. "All the different parts of the world just adopt new technology at different rates. We don't know how long the PS3 tail will last. We don't know how it will be compared to the PS2. The PS2 lasted very deep into the PS3 cycle. There was a broad price difference between PS3 launch and PS2 end of life. We don't know where all this is going to go, but we will continue to support the PS3 through first and third parties as long as there is a good business there for us."

More tidbits here - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-06-27-sony-turnover-helped-foster-indie-love

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