SCEA PR manager Ryan Bowling informed Next-Generation that a number of development kits have shipped to studios, saying:

“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,” Bowling stated.

He also offered the latest PS3 dev kit shipment figures, in an effort to exhibit Sony’s commitment to developers. “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.”

Let me see - 10,000 dev kits to 208 companies means an average of 48 dev kits per company. That’s a lot of developers! I wonder if artists need dev kits too, or just the programmers?

At any rate, an average of 48 dev kits to 208 developers means there’s a lot of people working on PS3 games. Of course lots of those will be for evaluation only, or go unused, but still. These are the kind of numbers I like to see!

SCEA Third-Party Manager Joins Ubisoft