14 DAY TRIAL // For all those developers who are looking for an opening to get into the video game industry Sony says that its PlayStation Home service might just be the best answer.
Jack Buser, who is the director of PlayStation Home, has told ShackNews that, “Home tends to be one of the easiest points of entry for content creation on PlayStation. Home is all scripting (LUA), and all the 3D stuff is being done in Maya. So it’s super-easy.”
He added, “You can have teams of literally one person. Usually team sizes vary between five to ten people. You can create a full-on game the scope of Sodium in six months. That’s just not possible in traditional console development.”
The Sony executive believes that the costs of developing a gaming experience for Home will be very low because the level of technical knowledge needed to create it is limited.
It also seems that Sony is actively looking at what small developers are creating specifically for Home and are preparing financial support for the most promising of them, with the ultimate aim being to launch games on the PlayStation Network or even via disk on the PS3.
The company is even ready to actually pay developers to create specific experience for Home, with Buser saying that they are looking for development teams to deliver a shooter.
Sony has announced in late August that it plans to fundamentally change the structure of Home, making it more of a social gaming space.
There will be districts for various genres and players will get a new central structure called the Hub.
The idea is to make gamers spend more time in Home and become engaged with the experiences that it offers, perhaps spending some money in the process.
This move was probably inspired by the runaway success seen by social games launched on Facebook, like FarmVille, The Sims Social and others.