Talking at a roundtable that PSLS’ Anthony Severino attended, Adam Boyes, VP of Publisher Relations at SCEA, explained how Sony got indie developers working on the PS4.
What we want to do is create great content, allow people to have access to great content… and I kinda had this revelation – when I was at Capcom I ran product development and we would go out there and try and find great games to publish, and that was fun. But I had a revelation during that tenure there that we’re now applying to Sony: I no longer know what’s cool. There’s such a broad amount of content out there. Thomas Was Alone- if I saw that game, where you move around squares and pegs and stuff like that, I’d have been like ‘huh?’, right? If I’d have had a pitch meeting with them, they’d be like ‘no but there’s narrative, and you’re basically like the Tetris pieces sprawled across the world trying to get back together’.
And the revelation we had was that one person cannot tell people what’s going to be cool. [Ed: For readers wondering, Thomas Was Alone was really cool]
Developers should be given a megaphone to be able to talk about their content and give it out to people. And, as much as I think the iOS Store and Steam are great, every developer that started making games has that aspiration to be able to play it on their 60″ TV. And there’s that connection with the controller – you take a game like Super Crate Box, which I loved when I played on my iPhone, but when I played on my Vita with those buttons it just felt like being young again.
He later said that Sony has a team that reaches out to developers to get them to bring their games to PlayStation – “all they do is go out there and try to find what’s great.” The team used to be two people, and now is nine. It also seemed like he was talking about SCEA only, so SCEE likely have a similar team.
With a whole host of indie games announced and shown for PS4 on the E3 stage, it’s clear that Sony has given a megaphone to a lot of small developers at E3.
Here’s hoping they can keep it up.
