Sony is taking the indie scene very seriously as reiterated by Shuhei Yoshida, head of PlayStation Worldwide Studios. Many indie developers have already started to flock to the PS4 with the ultimate promise of self-publishing rights.
Over the years, indie developers have complained over Microsoft’s increasingly bureaucratic policies that are viewed as somewhat heavy handed. Hello Games once called Xbox Live a “slaughter house” for indie games citing the fact that Microsoft does not allow developers to self-publish. Instead they have to seek out a third party publisher such as EA or Activision at which point the money made back starts to dwindle on an already low profit margin.
In an interview with CVG, Blow revealed that The Witness will be a timed exclusive on the PS4. Back in 2011, Blow had this to say about PSN:
If you’re thinking about the impact of indie games on the whole forum of games then probably Sony has done more because of the way they curate the games they put on there – they’re actually looking for games that are artful or experimental.
Apparently the reason The Witness became a timed PS4 exclusive was due to Microsoft’s lack of communication.
There were people at Sony who really liked the game and were keeping in touch with us about it, and so we naturally started going to their PS4 developer events, got a dev kit, and started playing with it.
I don’t have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, and haven’t been disclosed on their next console, but all our technical people like the PS4 specs a lot more than the leaked Durango specs, and we like the positioning of the PS4 (it’s about games) a lot more than what we perceive Microsoft’s positioning is going to be.
This perception that Microsoft is pushing indie gaming is something that has been building over time. A major complaint from the XBLIG community is Microsoft attempt to burry the indie game section deeper and deeper within the dashboard menus with every update.
This is what one angry indie developer said about Microsoft’s dashboard updates:
I think Indie Games was originally conceived to goose the major publishers in to supporting digital distribution – since they were slow to adopt. "Mission accomplished, now Indie Games go away."
Journey was voted Game of the Year by many gaming outlets overtaking even full retail packaged games. Self-publishing is going to be a big deal going into the next generation for a lot of these indie studios and it seems that Sony is looking to embrace this model.
