Oh Boy, Sony Hears Your Pleas for Shenmue on PlayStation

Sony is eager to bring SEGA’s seminal Dreamcast exclusive Shenmue to the PlayStation platforms. Earlier in the year it announced that it had constructed a new division designed to localise and oversee ports of popular third-party releases on its systems, and speaking with Kotaku at an event in New York City this week, publisher and developer relations executive Adam Boyes admitted that its internal list spans hundreds of games – and includes Ryo Hazuki’s ambitious excursion, as well as the likes of Yakuza 5 and Final Fantasy Type-0.

“When we started the third-party production team, it was born out of necessity,” he told the publication as part of a candid interview. “We had a lot of publishers and a lot of content that had come out for various platforms and various territories that weren't necessarily coming to our territory, platforms we'd love to see them on. We've got a massive list – we're calling everyone trying to get that list as much as possible. A lot of issues come around clearances or intellectual property ownerships and stuff like that.”

He continued: “We get a ton of requests for Yakuza, a ton of requests for Shenmue. We see the list. We have a person that compiles those lists and prioritises based on how many requests that we've gotten. And I think to date that there's well over 10,000 mentions across forum threads and stuff like that. So those are the ones that we're focused on.” Boyes added elsewhere in the interview that we’d start seeing the results of the department’s labour fairly soon. “I would say within the next six months we'll have at least one if not a few announcements to make on that front,” he beamed.

Whether or not we’ll see Shenmue ported to the company’s consoles remains to be seen – but we suspect that Yakuza 5 will be a lock at this point. It’s easily one of the most demanded games for the PlayStation 3, and while SEGA may not have been keen to localise this latest instalment, we suspect that it’ll be more than happy to let Sony pick up the slack. What other third-party titles would you like to see on PlayStation? Keep your requests coming in the comments section below.