When Retro City Rampage developer Brian Provinciano launched his game on consoles, he had a chance to work with Sony, Microsoft, and Valve. Overall, Provinciano declared to IGN that Sony is the easiest company to develop games for, specifically because of the similarities between the PlayStation 3 and Vita.
"...as a developer, someone who's done development on every platform under the sun, the Vita SDK (Software Development Kit)... were just super well-put-together and easy to use...If you were to do your game on, say, Wii U and 3DS, you'd be doing everything twice. They're completely different systems. With Vita and PS3, there's a lot of similarities."
In addition to the ease of putting the game on Sony's consoles, they were also more willing to work with Provinciano on coming up with a release date and strategy, something Microsoft was less accommodating of.
"On Xbox, I'm not sure if you know about the slot setup, but pretty much, your game gets out there when they say it can. You have very little control. You're just lucky to get whatever slot you get. That one reason alone is a big factor as to why I've been able to have so much success on PlayStation and less on Xbox."
Provinciano also compared working with Steam and the Xbox, noting that Steam was also much easier to work with and put the game out for than the Microsoft-backed system.
"It was over a year of work and I don't know how many man-months just to deal with the Xbox side of the business things and all that other stuff...Whereas Steam was just three days, and then Steam is 100 percent feature-identical to the Xbox version."
Provinciano has been so impressed with the abilities of Sony and the Vita that he will be hosting two different seminars at the Game Developers Conference March 25-29. One is "PlayStation Vita Development: From Start-to-Finish and Why You Should Be Excited About It" and the other "One Man, 17 SKUs: Shipping On Every Platform At Once."
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