Ninja Theory: We'd Love To Have Done Heavenly Sword 2 If Sony Didn't Own The IP

Look guys, we get it, your company is out to make money and you got totally burned releasing an exclusive in the early days of the PlayStation 3. That's fine.

We don't blame you, studio boss Tameem Antoniades, for answering CVG's question in this instance, presumably because you got cornered to make this quote — but still, we genuinely feel like we've heard you tell us you made no money off Heavenly Sword at least a zillion times now. Add one more time to that.

“I don’t know if Sony made any money on Heavenly Sword but we didn’t,” Antoniades added. Surprise!

“There are pros and cons. If you’re exclusive you get more attention, but when you’re multi-platform, at this stage in the cycle, there’s more competition. You’ve got to weigh it against each other.”

Right. So Heavenly Sword 2 ain't going to happen then?

“We couldn’t do Heavenly Sword 2 as a multi-platform because it’s owned by Sony, the tech we developed for that game is also owned by Sony,” he said.

Of course, Sony could put the IP in other hands such as Sony Cambridge or Ready At Dawn, but we doubt that's going to happen this late in the game.

Sometimes the multiplatform talk scares us. We understand costs are spiralling, etc, but if Sony hadn't thought ahead and secured an extremely strong first-party, there'd be practically nothing to separate the PlayStation 3 and XBOX 360 right now. You saw that at Microsoft's press conference. Outside of Kinect, where the company were clamouring for an identity and were actually saved by third-party offerings, Microsoft is nothing but Gears, Halo and Fable. The death of the exclusive has done that to them, which is unfortunate.

As more and more exclusives die a horrible death, we're genuinely concerned for the state of the industry. It's the PlayStation ethos (and any other platform ethos) that makes gaming appealing on a deeper level to us, and we're frightened that it's going to disappear.