Sony’s relationship with indie developers has had some ups-and-downs over the last ten-and-a-bit years.
Many of you may recall during the PS4’s initial E3 press conference, the platform holder took the unprecedented opportunity to spotlight a bunch of indie games coming to the console. This was a surprise move at the time, because historically trade shows had been reserved solely for the biggest AAA games.
But as the PS4 gained popularity, the manufacturer’s interest inevitably started to wane. The company was heavily criticised for failing to support smaller studios, and releasing software on the system became a massive headache.
Shuhei Yoshida was asked by then-CEO Jim Ryan to fix all that, and in an interview with Venture Beat, the ex-PS Studios boss shared some interesting intel on his progress.
“A few years back, one of the reasons I got that job from Jim [was] we’d been criticised by the indie community. They said that PlayStation doesn’t care about indies. You don’t hear that kind of criticism anymore.
“Last year we had lots of anecdotes from our indie partners that their new games were selling better on PlayStation than any other platform. That’s amazing. Some games sold better on PlayStation than on PC.
“When I started that work five years ago, our indie partners would say that when they released their games multiplatform, the Nintendo Switch version would sell three to five times more than PlayStation. Bit by bit, that gap has narrowed down. We have a strong team inside the company supporting indies.”