Sony made announcements that they are bringing more independent games to the Playstation 4 console. Zombie's Studios' Blacklight: Retribution will make an appearance on the next gen Sony platform. According to a report on Gamasutra “The company also announced that popular parody fighting game Divekick, new puzzle game Metrico, from Digital Dreams, and Primal Carnage Genesis, from Lukewarm Media, are coming to its platforms.”
The company have made changes to make life easier for independent developers who will be using their consoles to release games. Sony's Adam Boyes spoke to Gamasutra to explain the changes. He said that having veteran software developer Mark Cerny as the lead architect for their Playstation 4 hardware is vital. He even suggested that the company might compete with a Steam Box.
He said the changes to the concept submission process will be better “It used to be two stages, and all this feedback, and now it's just one, and it's optional feedback, so there's no greenlighting process, no voting, no weird stuff.”
Developers will be getting more support “So if it's, hey, these guys are developing content for Vita, and we like the team, so we send them Vita kits as loaners for free. Or waiving patch fees for independent developers, if they need that support, then we're totally behind it.”
The Playstation 3 seems to be already in the sidelines. Playstation 4 is the focus now “It's been a big focus for us — when I started writing disclosures for PlayStation, making sure indie developers were part of the disclosure process. We had to really bubble up.
The great thing is, unilaterally, because Shu Yoshida is such a big fan of indie developers, so they allowed us to say, “Hey, guess what, indies are top priority as well,” so we've gone very aggressively after a lot of independent developers for PS 4.”
When Gamasutra asked him about getting Independent developers for the Playstation 4 he said “Well I think we looked at how we approached PlayStation 3, and independent game developers. It wasn't a focus. The machine had a lot of proprietary aspects to it. It was very hard for developers to master. This time around from the ground up, from the fact that [Mark] Cerny was lead systems architect, building all the components, it meant that our services and processes had to be more developer-focused.
So we've had to, from day one, think about what happens if guys like Vlambeer, how do we make it as easy as possible for them to play on the big screen? And the great thing about all of our different platforms is, if they want to start on PlayStation Mobile or Vita, they can sort of graduate up to PS4 and PS3 from that. It's really about how we get them to play their content on the big screen and in an engaging way, and really use all the new bells and whistles on PS4.”
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