Jonathon Blow, who came on stage to showcase his new game called The Witness, at the PS4 event, revealed to Kotaku that there was no money involved in making the PS4 version of the game a timed exclusive.
“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,” he told Kotaku.
“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.
He revealed that Sony gave them a dev kit and they were interested in the game.
“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.”
The game was announced to be a launch title and you can check details on that here.