14 DAY TRIAL // In the race for releasing Playstation3 safely, things don't seem to go precisely as planned. Mark DeLoura announced his departure from the manager of director relations position held at Sony Computer Entertainment America. After a five year odyssey with Sony, he admits having mixed feelings about leaving. But things are all set, since he relocated from Foster City to San Francisco in order to join Ubisoft's studio as technical director. While employee shifts preceding new console launches aren't uncommon, the recent departure of senior director of communications Molly Smith raises a question about Sony's actual policies.
Ubisoft had similar problems to the one experienced by Sony, with the departure of Julien Merceron in late 2005. DeLoura has a long standing in the gaming business as before SCEA he was lead technical engineer at Nintendo of America. In addition he also was the editor in chief of Game Developer Magazine for a while. DeLoura still has a seat ready on the advisory board of the Game Developers Conference and often enough is a session presenter at GDC. With such a strong background, the future looks promising, regardless of brand, as DeLoura does seem confident, ready to take the past victories with Sony and move on.
Sony confirmed the departure and announced his successor: "Yes, Mark DeLoura, SCEA's manager of developer relations, has left the company; J. Patton will continue to oversee the company's developer relations team". SCEA would like to assure the general public that developer relations will remain rock solid and yet another measure towards developing full PS3 titles was taken:
"To date we have shipped more than 10,000 development systems to 208 companies in 11 countries, the largest number ever for a PlayStation platform. The best and brightest development teams are hard at work creating familiar franchises and original IP for the PS3 including: EA, Konami, Sega, Rockstar, Activison and our own internal studios just to name a few."