March 4th, 2010 @ Sway Bar, London
UK studios converge to battle over who's the cleverest - have you booked your place yet?
Thursday April 22nd, 2009 @ The Brewery, London
The countdown to the MCV Awards 2010 has begun – with date, venue and categories announced.
July 14th, 2010 @ The Hilton Metropole, Brighton
The Develop Industry Excellence Awards is the only event which rewards the work done by Europe’s leading games development companies.
Canadian iPhone developer Frima strikes deal with Sony for PSPgo game
Sony is seeing the beginnings of what it hopes is a vast migration of iPhone developers to PSPgo projects
During its Gamescom press conference, Sony revealed that its new Minis range – PSPgo games, sized under 100MB, sold cheap – has already courted enough small developers to create about 50 Mini-games by the end of the year.
One of those developers was revealed to be HoneySlug, a three-man studio based in London. HoneySlug has already created two games for the iPhone – Ric Rococo and Balloon Headed Boy – but the team is now focusing its efforts on Sony’s new disc-less handheld.
Further accelerating Sony’s push into a market that has downloaded over 1 billion iPhone Apps, the firm is partnering with Canadian studio Frima to develop Zombie Tycoon; “a thinking man’s zombie game”.
Frima had previously made two iPhone titles – GalaXseeds Tuber Shooter and iBrain Fit-IQ – but the group is, at least for now, putting down its iPhone SDK.
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Part of the appeal in developing Minis as opposed to iPhone Apps may indeed be the popularity of the latter.
The App store is now flooded with cheap games, and many developers are struggling to stand out from the crowd. However many Mini-games the PSPgo has by the end of twelve months may indeed be symptomatic of this saturation point.
..is that the iPhone is so easy to develop for, that the crass and stupid games get through.
We're seriously considering developing for PSPgo Minis, but I don't think it will kill of our iPhone/Touch projects.
BK.
Just been looking and it seems the PSP dev kit price is $1500, this doesn't compare well with the FREE iPhone SDK (which I believe has a $99 publishing fee attached), or the low cost XBLA SDK (which costs $99/£65 for a creators club premium membership to run code on a standard 360).
They should have chosen the same low priced development cost as XBLA or iPhone and simply put in place a more rigorous publishing assessment, to filter out the cr*p. Unfortunately, it appears Apple and Microsoft are letting any old rubbish through which is crippling the indie market.
Perhaps they see the slightly higher SDK cost as a deterrent to the type of people overloading the Apple store or Community Games section. A good idea in principle, but it also deters those truly talented devs who simply can't justify that initial outlay, or who have seen the mess the Apple store is in and doesn't think that kind of situation is worth that outlay.
Despite the initial cost of the PSPGo SDK, I think you have to have the right attitude, determination and brilliant concept that can be made, then just get on and do it. $1500 is relatively little. If the business model works then why not? If the concept is brilliant then you will get support from Sony, which is more than can be said of Apple.
Take on board that there is the piracy issue on iPhone, which is a platform issue Apple doesn't appear to be doing anything about, and the cost of the $1500 SDK would offset that. I think the piracy issue on PSP is actively being worked on by Sony, and whilst never truly eradicated it's less of an issue, IMO.
As an indie iPhone developer I'm seriously looking into porting my IP to PSPGo.
The biggest thing Sony has to offer developers that Apple cannot, is massive support. Sony has more direct experience developing real, quality video games than any other hardware producer in the world. They've always had an open-door policy regarding their resources. 'Sony casa es su casa.'
Great news for the PSP which is in desparate need of accessible and interesting little games.
it's sensible to say they're not competeing for the Iphone market, because if they saiud that and then failed they'd look stupid, and Sony have done enough of that over the last few years.
it says also that the I[phone market is flooded, hopefully Sony will have high enough standards to only let decent games and apps on PSN. if it gets full of bunk then it'll be bad news for all concerned.
