Sony Sony Wants to Repair its Relationship With its Indie Partners (IGN)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Sony Wants to Repair its Relationship With its Indie Partners - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

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Back in July, a number of indie publishers publicly called out Sony for its apparent ongoing dismissal of the challenges facing small developers trying to publish games on PlayStation. While publicly Sony offered no official comment on these complaints, it appears that the company was quietly listening after all.

 

 

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Back in July, a number of indie publishers publicly called out Sony for its apparent ongoing dismissal of the immense challenges facing small developers trying to publish games on PlayStation. While publicly Sony offered no official comment on these complaints at the time, it appears that the company was quietly listening after all -- and has recently begun to take some action.

 

Looking back at our conversations with these publishers at the time, a number of key issues were brought to light. Sony, indie publishers and developers said, had overly complex tools and forms, unclear processes, and poor communication with its indie partners when it came to getting answers, guidance, or issues resolved. They also expressed that while discoverability was an industry-wide issue, Sony was at best indifferent or at worst actively adversarial to these struggles, making PlayStation a very challenging platform for indie game sales.

 

What’s more, it sounds like the vocal indies who spoke up in July were not alone in feeling this way. IGN has obtained a copy of a document entitled “2021 Global Partner Survey Results,” which was sent out to a number of Sony’s partner publishers and developers as a follow-up to a survey that was conducted sometime prior. The findings document is short -- only three pages long -- and does not specifically mention the public complaints from this past summer. But it does identify three target areas for “continued improvement” based on the results of the survey, all of which directly correspond to issues the indie publishers brought up on social media and in articles.

 

 

The console makers still can't match Steam when it comes to the promotion of indie games though

 

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Others such as Garner are less optimistic about the future of indies on PlayStation -- though Garner reiterates that the situation isn’t much better on other consoles. “Xbox is a little more open-handed with promotion and Switch provides you with a spot in a list, so both are a bit better than Sony. But in a world where Steam exists they are all being very silly, in my opinion.”

 

He says games like Neon Doctrine-published Legend of Tianding will “never be able to blow up on consoles” in the way they can on Steam due to Steam’s algorithms. Garner can market and build a game’s community, he says, and then when Steam’s algorithm notices interest, it will promote the game accordingly.

 

 

 

[SaysWho?]

It seems they were setting up plans, too, before the article came out:

 

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They were obviously crushed at the news, and it was clear that the account managers at Sony had been working hard for a long time to push through a lot of the ideas the indie developers flagged in our initial discussions," he says. "After the articles, that seemed to give a huge boost to initiatives they had already been planning, because rapidly after Sony started rolling out a bunch of big changes."

 

Really glad things are on the mend. Today's indie is tomorrow's big developer.