Sony’s unveiled plans to invest a whopping $20 million dollars in the platform holder’s Pub Fund to facilitate the development of exclusive games for PlayStation Network.

The program was originally unveiled at the Game Developers Conference back in 2009, and provides companies with an additional budget for which to invest in making innovative, exclusive titles for Sony’s flagship online service.

According to the press blurb,  "SCEA helps with game design and marketing plans but allows the developer to own the game’s intellectual property, publish the title and set the price." LINK

Sounds good especially the fact that the developer gets complete control over the game and owns the IP.

thumbs up..psn have been seeing some really good titles and have some very impressive ones like AMy and Journey coming out soon...good to see their commitment

More new games the better.

i love me some psn games =D

Thats good to hear. Can't wait to see more games like Pixel Junk Shooter, Flower, and Journey.

yes this is a win for all parties involved considering Dev's retain there rights and PSNers get more great innovative games

This will probably encourage more devs to start new IPs and in todays triple AAA oriented market thats a good thing.

In game development, that really isn't that much money ...

Even very low budget games, like those that target smart-phones, can cost an established company that does "unusual" things like pays their employees, provides benefits, and has office space $500,000+ to develop; and, depending on how this money is used, $20 Million could disappear quite quickly with little to show for it.

If that 20milions result in 20-40 PSN games it's still huge amount.

Only if they're good games ...

In my opinion, the risk of a strategy like this is that the studios that would be the most successful on the platform would probably take advantage of a program like this to produce a more ambitious product and turn a profit at the expense of Sony. If I'm the studio that built Angry Birds I would be looking to get Sony to fund the expansion of my studio by getting as much money from them as possible; and if enough studios took this approach Sony's $20 would translate to a handful of titles. In contrast there, are a lot of tiny unknown studios with questionable talent who would take any amount of money in exchange for an exclusive game and if Sony approached a lot of these studios they would end up with a lot of low quality games.

The strategy isn't (necessarily) bad, but with how little money it is you can only really see it as a jump start to try to make the Playstation network more interesting; and it isn't enough money to make it viable without significant interest from small third party publishers who want access to the platform.