With Road Not Taken now available on PlayStation 4 (and free to PlayStation Plus members), developer Spry Fox held a Reddit AMA yesterday, where they gave us an update on the PlayStation Vita version, which was supposed to launch this fall:
The Vita version of the game has been severely delayed by technical issues, so we haven’t made any decisions about cross-buy yet. Honestly, at this point I’m just hoping we can still release the Vita version; there’s some thorny issues there and it doesn’t help that we rely on a middleware partner that midway through our Vita development announced they were ceasing ongoing development work for Vita. 🙁
Elsewhere in the AMA, it was revealed that Spry Fox originally intended for Road Not Taken to be a mobile game, but that all changed when Sony approached them:
We had actually intended to launch on mobile, but when we released our first trailer (just over a year ago) Sony reached out to us and expressed strong interest in the game. Having a platform partner that is excited about what you’re doing can make all the difference to an indie game developer, so we decided to take advantage of that opportunity.
All that said, I think it’s also worth noting that it’s increasingly difficult to sell non-f2p games on mobile. We’re friends with several other indies who have recently done high profile premium game releases on mobile, and they’ve pretty much all been disappointed by the results. The competition is brutal; you’re up against f2p games making millions of dollars a day and totally dominating the market, and meanwhile, you can’t sell the game that you spent years of your life on (and, in our case, hundreds of thousands of dollars on) for more than a couple bucks. It’s a tough business!
As well, “It took about two years to make Road Not Taken and 4 to 6 months to bring it over to the PS4 depending on how you count things.”
If Spry Fox offers an update on the PlayStation Vita version of Road Not Taken at some point, we’ll let you know.
[Source: Reddit via PlayStation Enthusiast]
