Inside Games have a lengthy interview with a group Idea Factory and CRI staff, and Japanese blog, Hachimaki, picked up on a couple of the interesting points of their talk.
One is that Idea Factory are going to be looking into what can be achieved on the Nintendo 3DS and NGP hardware, since both platforms are out this year (that’s a “maybe” in the case of NGP). This shouldn’t come as a surprise in the least.
The other pertains to how Idea Factory plan to approach development for Japanese and overseas gamers. As you might be aware, Idea Factory dabble in a fair amount of otome games, which are games targeted specifically at women. Hakuouki is one such series of games.
For the domestic market, Idea Factory plan to continue focusing on these titles. For their male-oriented games on PlayStation 3, however, they say they’re going to be taking the overseas market into account.
Note:
If you haven’t heard of them, CRI are a company that provide a variety of middleware solutions for game development, and Idea Factory rely on their products for development of some of their own titles.
One example of a CRI product is File Magic Pro (which reduces PSP load times), but they also provide development tools and video codecs like Sofdec, which you’ve probably seen a logo of in several games. You can find a list of games that use their various solutions on their website.