Sony Worldwide Studios SVP insists Jonathan Blow is just the start for independent studios on Sony's new console
Speaking to Develop Sony Worldwide Studios senior vice president Michael Denny has insisted that the PS4 will offer support to indies.
At last night's high profile PS4 announcement event in New York, support for indies was mentioned briefly a handful of times, with Jonathan Blow taking to stage to debut a new trailer for his long-in-development project The Witness.
But as the games development community digested all the details from the show, numerous indies took to Twitter, keen to hear just how important independent studios were to the console, and uncertain that they were a significant factor on Sony's priority list for the PS4.
Denny, however, has stated that indies are important to the PS4 and SCE.
“At PlayStation we want the broadest content we can possibly have, so of course we want the best big triple-A games, and the biggest genres out there," Denny told Develop today.
Advertisement
"But we also want other content as well. We want broader content and interesting content, and often that comes from smaller indie communities.”
"We’ve always been open to indies. Teams like Media Molecule – while they aren’t an indie now, as we signed them up as a first party developer – were just four people with a great idea when they came to us. So we’ve always been open to indies, and supporting them on a first party basis.
“And there’s lots of small teams out there in the third-party space that have lots of innovative ideas. In terms of those true indies – and you’ve already seen we’re working with Jonathan Blow for the PS4 already – we absolutely want to get that kind of content on our platform. We want to make it rich and varied, so we absolutely support indies with the PlayStation 4."
How open the PlayStation 4's architecture, developer environment and marketplace will be to indies remains to be seen, but Denny's words may offer some encouragement to concerned independent studios.
I think Sony are just bandying about the indie term to attract a certain target demographic.
I'm sure they are genuinely interested in high quality professionally produced games from small Independent studios, but are they really going to give a leg up to those indies still working up to that level?
During the PS4 announcement event, they were pushing interested indie devs over to their scedev.net/scea_licensing_info.php site. NDA's and Tool Loan Agreements? I'll just dial up the company lawyer... oh wait. I'm just a guy in a bedroom
It looks easy to get signed up - fill in the form and sign the NDA and tool loan agreement (none of which trouble me) - but I wonder what the acceptance conditions are.
Do you have to be a company? A company of certain size and/or with a commercially leased office? Have a back catalogue of releases? Will SCE want to examine your accounts? And how much will loan of the tools cost?
The devil is in the details, and probably hiding under an NDA.
