Anti-Indie'ers are giving me cancer!

[Zanten]

Goatseye said:

Isn't total free reign on the development and pusblishing process what the Indie developers and Sony boasting about since Feb 2013?

It is a big advantage for a small team dev but have people seen Mineclones on XBLA Indie section? Avatar COD games?

I'm pretty sure that Sod Drink garbage is gonna get a major rehaul.

As near as I can tell, Sony's approach (at least currently) is to reduce the number of steps between a developer beginning the process, and a developer finishing it; whereas I believe Sony's old policies had a 64-step protocol for a developer to get their game published on the platform, the new policies streamlined it to only a few steps. This doesn't necessarily mean (or, rather, doesn't have to mean) throwing open the doors and saying 'EVERYONE ON BOARD!' There can still be a '...are you ****ing kidding me?' stage to keep things from reaching Xbox Indie Market levels of crap; they just clearcut a lot of the bureaucracy, the paperwork, the frustrating and time consuming process of making everything happen, so a dev can get from A to Z that much more quickly.

They've also taken a greater, active interest in finding popular or anticipated indie titles on other platforms, primarily PC, sometimes before they've even released, and approaching the devs about bringing their game over to Playstation as well. Popular, quirky games, like Octodad or Surgeon Simulator, or even unreleased, but interesting looking titles. I believe they actually have a small team whose entire job IS finding worthwhile indie games, and coaxing them over to the platform.

Then there's the PubFund, a sort of against-royalties loan that Sony sometimes offers to worthwhile devs to help fund their game to completion, (basically, they give you ten thousand dollars, and take an extra chunk of your earnings, but ONLY until that ten thousand is paid off.)

 

 

TL;DR" Their approach seems to be both more aggressive, and (for the moment,) more restrained than just throwing open floodgates; they openly court promising indie developers, they've streamlined the red tape to make applying easier, and even have measures to help fund independant game development for devs they believe in without demanding exclusivity or owning the IP.