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The Witness on PS4: no money involved in exclusivity deal

Sony didn't fork out a pile of cash to score a PS4 console exclusive release for The Witness, according to Braid creator Jonathan Blow.

"People have been speculating that I got a money hat for this agreement with Sony, or that we needed to do this in order to fund development of The Witness. Actually, no money was involved at all," Blow told Kotaku.

Blow said he always hoped to launch on a console as well as on iOS and PC, and that because he fronts a small team with limited resources, he had to choose just one.

"Originally we thought we might be on the PS3 or Xbox 360, but eventually we decided not to target either of those due to the relatively low system specs. After some more time went by, and our release date drifted further into the future, we realized that the next-generation console launch time might be a good time to release the game," he said.

The Wii U is fairly model tech-wise, so Blow started looking at the PS4 and Microsoft's next 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," he said.

"I don't have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, and haven't been disclosed on their next console, 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) a lot more than what we perceive Microsoft's positioning is going to be."

As such, Braid's team just naturally started working on a PS4 port, and at the moment it's not practical to think about other consoles - although it hasn't been ruled out should the opportunity arrive.

"To be in the show we signed a timed exclusivity for competing consoles. But this was just a formalization of something that was already de facto," Braid said.

"We like the PS4 and we like the people at Sony we are working with, so it was an easy choice to make the agreement."

The Witness is a first-person puzzle game which Braid boasts contains no filler in its 25 hour experience.

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The Witness

iOS, PS4, Xbox One, PS3, PC

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

Contributor

Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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