“Total freedom. Total freedom. No constraint in anything,” Cage told Gamasutra when asked whether Sony had given Quantic Dream liberty to pursue its own agenda.

“Many publishers, after the success of Heavy Rain, would have said, ‘Well, you need to do Heavy Rain 2. And do what you want, but it’s going to be called Heavy Rain 2.’ And we never had this conversation with Sony. They just asked me, ‘What’s next? What do you want to do?’ ‘Well, I have this idea, what do you think?’ ‘Yeah. It looks great!’”

Cage said Sony didn’t even make small requests to change the game’s script, which was very important to the development of Beyond: Two Souls, because “this kind of project can only be made in complete freedom”.

“It’s really a story that I needed to tell, and Sony gave me the opportunity to do it. Which is quite unique. It’s really incredible in this industry to have the possibility to work like that,” he added.

“Usually, you make indie development, and you have limited resources, but you have freedom, or you work on a triple-A and you have the resources, but limited or no creative freedom. And I’m in the strange position where I have both.”

Without naming names, Cage said many of his peers at other developers had expressed a desire to have as much creative control as Qunatic Dream has.

“I felt many times people saying, ‘I wish we could do what you do’ which was really a surprise, because I thought that what game creators were actually doing [was what they wanted],” he said.

“Actually, no, they felt they had to do certain things, because they thought that’s what the market was expecting.”

Cage said developers stick to what they do due to external pressures.

“If you asked developers, they all have incredible ideas. There are tons of very talented people in this industry, but what you see these days is that when people cannot express them in the game space, sometimes they just leave the game space and go into films, or into movies, or do whatever,” he said.

“I think it’s our responsibility in the games industry to make sure that creative people have a space where they can have these ideas. It’s interesting to see indie developers these days, because I think there’s a lot of creativity with indie developers because they have this space of freedom where they can try new ideas, and I think they are the future of the industry.”

Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain has sold over 2 million copies by this time last year; is next game, Beyond: Two Souls, is expected in 2013, exclusively for PlayStation 3.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/08/28/cage-sony-grants-total-freedom-indies-the-future-of-the-industry/

I personally think yes. If I was a developer I would knock on Sony's door. They've been known to push innovative games forward. Ever since the mature and cool games on the ps1, (in a time when it was a kiddy industry) to the PS2s Team ICO classics, Eye toy, to thatgamecompany's Flower, Journey, Unfinished Swan and SCEJ's Rain.

A lesser publisher would have made GT5 a game with 1/5th of the content and release it in 2 years and cancel Last Guardian when they stumbled upon problems.

I think Naughty Dog said something similar like that too.

I respect Sony's stance on things like this.

It does sometimes blow up their face though, like in the case of The Last Guardian (good management isn't always about just letting a developer do whatever they want). 

If you could some how combine Sony + Nintendo's 1st party IP, you'd have just about the perfect game company IMO.

that would be asome

It works for most of their devs but there are some obvious exceptions where the team needs strong supervision.

So Sony basically allows an independent studio to do what it wants? How generous......

It's not just gaming. Apparently the writers of Breaking Bad had similar experiences with SONY production studios.

The only time they were asked to change something was when they referenced competitor cable channels and not the actual story content.

PC allows that since day 1
Consoles were made to control/ regulate the software output and generate revenue from it

Someone a bit clever would read inbetween the lines of the article and understand that Quantic Dream was allowed “Total freedom. Total freedom. No constraint in anything” (oh the irony).

The real question is on which criteria do Console/platform owners grant such freedoms, which are the tacit conditions, and when do developpers cross the line and see their prerogatives taken back.

Interesting, that could explain why that show is so good.