14 DAY TRIAL // Shuhei Yoshida, the leader of the Sony Worldwide Studios, is admitting that, at the moment, the PC market is more welcoming to indie game developers than the PlayStation 4 ecosystem, but he pledges that his team will work to lessen the gap between the two platforms in the near future.
Since the device was first announced in early 2013, the company enlisted a number of high-profile developers, including Jonathan Blow, to talk about the ease of creating titles for the new device.
After the actual launch of the PlayStation 4 in November of 2013, a wide variety of indie titles were released on it, some coming before they were offered on the PC or on the Xbox One from Microsoft.
Yoshida is quoted by Gamereactor.eu as saying that “PC is the most accessible platform. You don't need any permission to make games and release, and a system and platform like Steam is providing a great way to market those games.”
He adds, “What we want to do with PlayStation is we want to make it more accessible to these developers, because indie developers targeting PC or mobile are creating great games, and these teams tend to be very resource limited -number of programmers, they do not have many- so it's very important for us to make PlayStation accessible to those developers.”
The PlayStation 3 was known throughout its lifetime as a platform that was hard to develop for, despite the fact that it could deliver some solid experiences.
Both the PS4 and the Xbox One have architectures that are much closer to that of the PC, and that means smaller teams have the means to port their titles faster and more easily.
Indie developers are still finding that it is simpler to launch games on the PC because they can benefit from services like Early Access from Steam, which basically allow them to get access to money from fans even if the game is not actually completed.
There are also some issues with exclusivity deals when a game is aiming to get released on both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.
Both Sony and Microsoft want their games to reach as wide as possible an audience and that means that in the long term their platform require the delivery of a mix of AAA experiences, with high budgets for development and marketing, and indie titles, which can offer more innovation and surprises for gamers.