14 DAY TRIAL // When Sony announced the Minis section in the PlayStation Store, Apple felt like the ground was shaking under its feet. Basically, Minis are a group of games developed for the PlayStation Portable meant to be generally under the 100MB quota and part of the indie genre. The casual gamers that this kind of games appeal to have pretty much had their needs satisfied by the iPhone. But Sony saw this as an open market and decided to barge right in.
The iPhone is flooded with a huge amount of games from all sorts of indie developers. The main reason is the very open, undemanding selection process. Pretty much any games become available for the platform, so quality isn't really a standard. Sony took notice of this and plans to eliminate the same problem for the Minis with a little bit of quality control.
Eric Lempel, part of Sony's Minis team, offered an interview for Gamasutra regarding the quality issue of the games. While still having a nonrestrictive selection process for the games, Sony wants to use the program as a creative greenhouse. "We're really looking to offer some creative freedom here," Lempel said. "There's an experimental quality to Minis that we want to encourage.[...] You're going to get some Minis that will be fantastic and some that will be less so,” he further added. "That's just the nature of the business. Any gaming channel you'd care to name has its great products and some that are not so great."
The only test the games will have to pass is a "light QA phase" that will check for content and game bugs. "Part of it is the selection process. We're looking to lower the barriers to entry, not remove them. We don't want 25,000 Minis on the system if 24,000 are just poor-quality clones of the same four games. Even at the reduced price, purchasing an SDK and needing to pay for an ESRB rating speaks to dedication and a developer's commitment to a certain level of quality." All in all, the Minis might not become the huge games of tomorrow, but are bound to be a lot of fun.