A few months ago, Sony announced the formation of the Third Party Productions team, a new group within Sony’s third party relations meant to facilitate the localization or porting of content between regions or consoles. The first project announced by this team was the Vita port of Borderlands 2, which is a pretty major feat to accomplish in and of itself.

The team has since asked fans to send in requests for the kinds of games they’d like to see on their Playstation console of choice, and according to Sony’s Adam Boyes their top two choices were none other then SEGA’s Yakuza and Shenmue franchises. For what this means, please check out the full quote below the fold. For the full interview, please visit Kotaku.



Schreier: With the caveat that this is all up in the air, this is all in negotiations, are there any that you guys have in mind that you would really like to bring over here? Boyes: I think a lot—we get a ton of requests for Yakuza, a ton of requests for Shenmue. We see the lists. Like everything that people have tweeted Gio, literally we have a person that compiles those lists and prioritizes based on how many requests we’ve gotten. And I think to date there’s well over 10,000 mentions across like forum threads and stuff like that. So those are the ones we’re focused on. But I think the challenge is always that there’s so many different intricacies, going into is the creator there, what’s the current status, does the publisher have other things going, so it’s not as easy as like, ‘Why are you taking so long?’ There’s a lot of things you have to do. And because it is a new thing that we’re doing, it’s also difficult to sit down with a partner saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna do this, it’ll be fine.’ You can’t imagine that the Gearbox team and Randy Pitchford would be like, ‘Oh yeah yeah yeah take our baby and just whatever.’ They want to be really involved and they want to be sure we build trust. So I think what you’ll see is the first couple will take longer, and then once we get a couple of those games, especially ones localized from Japan over here, then I think you’ll see the cadence increase.

Before everyone gets excited or accuses Sony of being mendacious if there are no Yakuza or Shenmue related announcements six months from now, I’d like to add that the article states repeatedly that nothing is guaranteed and everything is still in negotiation. All we do know is that Yakuza and Shenmue are both highly requested by Sony’s fans. With luck, something awesome will come of this! We’ll just have to see.