... What?

10 million to Indies, 100 million for Covid 19 support and then 400 million buy in at a Chinese company last week. All those dollars being thrown around and you couldn't splurge on a couple more teraflops Sony? lol

For real though, good on Sony for showing some support through all this.

That's pretty nice. Good guy Sony.

Personally I would notice. There would be less junk in the new releases section.

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Seriously though, I imagine MS and Sony do a lot of help indie developers already via Live/Gamepass and PS+. They must get something from the large collections of indie games many of us have.

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.  

Awesome!!!

It's not that they will necessarily stop working, but rather their efficiency will drop.Most indies nowadays aren't one man teams, but are rather composed of 5, 10, 30 people.Take Image & Form for example.They are 40 men strong if I'm not mistaken, and they all work in a studio.

Because of this pandemic, I'm assuming they stopped working on said studio and are doing Home Office.For people unaccustommed with it, it slows down their work efficiency, meetings regarding decisions that have to be made in the game are slower(because nothing beats a face to face conversation.Yet) and so on.That's some of the reasons why the work will definetely slow down(pretty sure there are more variables), and that will happen while employees still receive their salaries in full.For a big company like Square, it might be incovinient but they will live, they have enough money and relevant IPs on the bank to survive.But not an indie that requires the monthly sales of past games to keep afloat.

Because, as it's pretty obvious, sales will go down soon enough.Companies already started firing people left and right and, while at this moment people aren't really thinking about what will happen in the next 3 or 4 months and thus are expending the money they have, this economic crisis will soon hit everyone and stuff like videogames will be hit the hardest.

And the first to suffer are the indie developers, especially the "small" ones, because if someone's revenue is down, and they can only buy one game a month, they will always choose FF 7 Remake over Gato Roboto.Always.That's why.

So again, videogame is safe for now, but will soon feel the effects of this economic crisis which in my opening we already are in.

Corona is a big problem for the AAA-gamesindustry and new indie-studios:(