Sony To Provide Up To $10 Million To Struggling Indie Studios

[VAMatt]

Dallinor said:

VAMatt said:
This is just a PR play. Gaming has benefited from the virus fallout. So, this would have made more sense, from an actual help perspective, before the virus had everyone parked in from of their consoles and PCs all day.

Can you explain how developers who are currently developing games have benefited?

Work has most likely slowed down, and they may have had to invest in additional inventory to set up working from home. They are now going to miss both GDC and E3, so anything they had invested in to showcase their game is now lost. (That could be substantial for an indie developer in desperate need of exposure). 

I would imagine this is for indie developers working on exclusive content for the PS5/PC, and that's the criteria. 

Most devs are setup to work reasonably well from home, equipment wise, especially the large portion of the Indy market that is not working on technically advanced games.  

I do see your point that the benefit is mostly to games currently on the market, rather than ones in development at this time.  I don't see how there's undo difficulty for small devs to keep working though, in most cases.  

Another thing I just thought of, not specific to this, but a benefit to publishers and devs in general - a big change in the ratio of physical sales to digital.  Much more of the pie is going to digital right now, which benefits pubs and devs, at the expense of retailers.  Indy games are mostly distributed digitally, so that could be helpful to them, as more people spend time browsing the online store rather than walking into GameStop.