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Jonathan Blow Issues Clarification Regarding The Witness' PS4 Exclusivity
When Jonathan Blow took the stage at the PlayStation 4 announcement earlier this week, some people walked away from the event thinking that his new game, The Witness, is a PlayStation 4 exclusive. To clear up the confusion, creator Jonathan Blow posted a new entry on his blog.
"Our deal with Sony is a limited-time exclusivity that applies to competing console platforms," he wrote. "Basically it is that you will see the game on the PlayStation 4 for a while before you will see it on the Wii U or the rumored next Microsoft console. (We haven’t been disclosed on Microsoft’s next console, so I don’t know anything about that platform besides the rumors that are on the internet). This exclusivity does not prevent us from being on the PC or iOS at launch, for example."
Blow also addressed the chatter from some of the more cynical corners of the Internet claiming he sold out by signing this deal with Sony.
"People have been speculating that we got paid for PS4 exclusivity, but that is not the case," he wrote. "There was no money involved."
So why did he sign the deal?
"The real situation is that, because we are a small developer, we only have the ability to launch on a small number of platforms at once...To launch a high-spec version of the game on a console, it came down to a choice between the next Microsoft console or the next Sony console. There were people at Sony who really liked the game and were keeping in touch with us about it, and so we naturally started going to their PS4 developer events, got a dev kit, and started playing with it. I don’t have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, but all our technical people like the PS4 specs a lot more than the leaked Durango specs, and we like the positioning of the PS4 (it’s about games) more than what we perceive Microsoft’s positioning is going to be."
To read more about Blow's decision, head to his blog by clicking the link above.
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