MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Yesterday, Sony announced in a blog post a new publishing initiative: PlayStation Indies. With Yoshida stating: “Our goal is to make PlayStation the best place to develop, find, and play great indie games.”
Of course PlayStation has long courted indie developers most notably from the launch of the PS4. But that activity never had its own branding before, with the new service providing something a little more tangible for indies to get hold of.
“I have been working closely with all departments at Sony Interactive Entertainment to elevate our efforts to help make indie developers’ lives easier and their titles shine in this super competitive videogame market,” said Yoshida.
What the move means in practice isn’t clear, though, as Sony didn’t share any details as to whether this amount to an internal restructure or just a customer-facing initiative. It seems likely that changes were already afoot with Yoshida’s appointment as head of indies in November and this is part of that change.
More concretely, Yoshida announced that an indie game would be added to PlayStation Now every month from now on. The post also introduced trailers from a wide range of new indie titles coming to both PS4 and PS5 later this year.
- Worms Rumble brings real-time multiplayer action to PS4 and PS5
- Haven is a chill co-op adventure coming to PS4 and PS5
- Introducing Carto, a charming, innovative puzzle adventure coming to PS4
- Hacking-themed platformer Recompile is coming to PS5
- Where the Heart Is: A narrative adventure between truth and fiction, coming winter 2020 to PS4
- The recursive world simulation & puzzle-making process in Maquette
- Action platformer F.I.S.T: Forged in Shadow Torch coming to PS4
- Heavenly Bodies is coming to PS5 and PS4
- Explore ambiguity in Creaks, coming to PS4 this summer
In fact, it may be that such announcements and marketing might be the main drive, visibly at least, for the new branding.
“The indie community is increasingly important for the future of the video game industry, as AAA game development has grown so financially demanding that big companies are finding it harder to take risks to invest in new concepts that may or may not work,” said Yoshida.
“We trust indie developers with strong vision will continue to bring ideas that have never been tried before, creating whole new genres of games and advancing the art and meaning of video games. PlayStation has always embraced games with completely new concepts, like PaRappa the Rapper, Katamari Damacy, LittleBigPlanet, and Journey, and we look forward to seeing what surprising new ideas will come next!”
