NGP games getting simultaneous retail/digital release

Sony will release games for its NGP handheld simultaneously at both retail and on PSN.

That’s one of many claims to emerge from a developer’s day held at Sony’s London office yesterday. It had previously been confirmed that NGP will support physical retail by shipping games on high-capacity custom flash cards.

Sony has already experimented with simultaneous releases with some titles on PS3.

There has also been plenty of praise for Sony’s approach toward developers with its new machine.

"NGP is a developer’s dream – Sony is finally doing the things developers have been crying out for for years," an anonymous source told Eurogamer.

"Sony has made it completely developer-centric this time. The development kit is really simple to plug in and use. It opens direct in Windows Explorer and you can see all systems on a network – so you could, for example, update the firmware of multiple NGPs at once.

"A PS3 dev station can take three hours to set-up. This looks like it will take under 20 mins. It just makes everything easier – they’ve really thought about it this time".

The site also claims that development hardware for the device has been in the hands of key partners for almost a year. New kits are being shipped in for UK devs in the next few months, with studios having to submit a "20-page concept document on a game they want to release at launch".

Sony is also actively encouraging developers to build in cross-platform compatibility with PS3.

There’s also lots of positive news about the power of the device, too.Attendees were treated to a demo of "the WipEout HD PS3 engine running on PS3 with no changes to the art platform. That means full resolution, full 60 frames per second. It looks exactly the same as it does on PS3 – all the shader effects are in there".