Driving Genre Is "Difficult" Right Now, PS4 Boss Says

Sony's PlayStation 4 racing game Driveclub has sold 2 million copies and the company is reportedly planning Gran Turismo 7 for before 2017, but the publisher still believes the driving genre overall is not an easy one to find success in right now. That's according to PlayStation boss Shuhei Yoshida, who outlined his thoughts on the subject in a new interview.

"The driving genre's a very difficult market right now," he told Eurogamer when asked if the Driveclub series had a future. "The team, we need to find a great angle for the racing to continue, to come up with a new racing game, if we're to look at another racing title. Creative ideas come when things are tough, so that lightbulb moment, I'm looking forward to."

Outside of Sony, Microsoft's Forza series appears to be doing well on Xbox. On Xbox One alone, across Forza Horizon 2 and Forza Motorsport 5, the series has reached 7 million players. Importantly, this figure was announced before the release of Forza Motorsport 6, meaning the number is now likely higher.

Also in the interview, Yoshida discussed Driveclub's troubled launch, which he said was attributable in part to the massive success of the PS4 platform. In short, Sony didn't expect the PS4 to sell as well as it did, meaning the game's servers were strained beyond what Sony had anticipated. But with the launch issues worked out, Sony is happy with where the game stands now.

"Driveclub has sustained its momentum," Yoshida said. "They needed to spend time to really rewrite the server-side of the game. We weren't expecting this many people would buy a PlayStation 4, and have PlayStation Plus membership. Because the title was originally titled for the launch of the system, the number of potential people to download for free for the PS Plus version would be much smaller than two years after the launch. We realised the daunting task of supporting potentially millions and millions of people to download and play. The team needed to go back to the drawing board and re-engineer the server-side."

He added: "While they were doing this, they kept releasing new content and people continued to play the game and enjoy it. I'm really happy with how things went forward."

In other recent Driveclub news, Sony has announced that it will remove the free PlayStation Plus edition of the racing game on October 6. In addition, Driveclub developer Evolution has teased that the game is "gearing up for another big year," featuring "big surprises" and more.

Would you like to see Sony make more racing games in the future? Let us know in the comments below.