Sony will allow indie devs to publish their own games on PlayStation 4 | Hacker News Reader

Sony will allow indie devs to publish their own games on PlayStation 4

venturebeat.com

243 pointsjeffreyfox86 comments

I'd be immensely wary of Sony declaring themselves open to indie devs. When I was a teenager I did homebrew development on the Sony PSP. Sony did every damned thing in their power to stop it. To run homebrew, you had to either run an older version of firmware or root the device. Every time an exploit was patched, a new one was found. This inevitably meant a lot of people spent a lot of time rooting the PSP[1]. I was impressed with how the security of the device fell time and time again to the community.

If Sony just allowed the PSP to run homebrew games, they'd not be in such a mess. Many of the developers rooting the devices just wanted to run their own software, but the shadow community would use that result to pirate games. Separating the two communities by allowing homebrew software on their device would have made sense for their own protection.

This was then followed up by the PS3. After releasing with both the ability to run Linux, they removed both. You paid for a device with X, then they removed X. Understandably the community became somewhat irate. Eventually their private signing key for their entire console was leaked due to the desire to allow homebrew and to restore OtherOS (Linux) support[2]. Sony's legal department tried to fix that...

So, from all this past history, I wouldn't trust Sony's new direction. At the very least not until they start to act on their new found conviction.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Portable#Homebrew

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Hacking_the_PlaySta...

Edit: Thanks for Dylan16807 correcting me re: PS2 emulation. Having a deeper read into it, the situation is confusing -- some models have hardware PS2 support, others do emulation, and then it was completely dropped whilst "PS2 Classics" (recompiled or via emulation) were released on the PS3 as pay for downloads.

If you watched the announcement I think you can get a sense that Sony has learned a lot from their past. You can tell that they cared about the people that they made this product for.

Something really striking about this whole Xbox One vs PS4 thing is how one sided the enthusiasm is (in favor of the PS4). It's all the more striking when you consider that the gaming community is one of the most passionate, fickle, and hardest-to-please bunch of people there are.

I think Sony really listened to what people really wanted and made something with those things in mind.

Just gauging the reactions from across the internet and from across my diverse group of friends, the PS4 is being received so incredibly well and the sentiment towards the Xbox One is exactly the opposite.

I've noticed this too. It's funny because the gaming community tends to be very polarized into fanboy groups for each console. It sort of weird right now because it seems like almost everyone is super pro Playstation. It's like the Xbox fans are pissed off and staying silent, and the Nintendo fans have just given up.

The fanboyism is rooted in nothing that has to do with the consoles themselves. It's neotribalism at its most blatant: it's the need to belong among a group sometimes reviled (usually, ironically enough, for the rampant and verbally violent neotribalism).

This is absolutely untrue. If you watched the Sony E3 presentation for example, the moment the crowd went wild was the announcement of used game support, no check-ins, and ownership of games. This is by far the most important reason the PS4 is getting so much support, and it has nothing to do with neotribalism. The presentation was incredibly well done.

What saddened me most about that reaction was that it was for the announcement of something that we have always had. The biggest reaction at E3 was to a non-restriction, not a game!

It's only for the benefit of all the people who keep saying "Sony hasn't confirmed or denied that they won't be doin the same as the Xbone"

That's not what I'm talking about.

OK, then, how does your "neotribalism" theory explain the very sudden dissolution of three tribes into just one, while at the same time casting the original three tribes as "neotribal"? I don't see how you can call the original situation A, then insist that the exact opposite occurring is also a case of A. Or at least not without a great deal more justification of that than just tossing out a single word.

> the PS4 is being received so incredibly well and the sentiment towards the Xbox One is exactly the opposite.

It's probably because Sony hasn't said anything yet about their used game policy. I would seriously doubt they don't get publishers get their way on the Sony console as well just as they did on the Xboxone. Unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot and lose publishers support.

They announced that you can sell your used games if you like, share them with your friends, or keep them forever.

Essentially you can do whatever you want with your games; zero DRM.

Umm ... no one said anything about zero DRM. The existing generation of consoles have drm but let you play used games, sell games, etc.

Go look at the number one thread in r/gaming right now.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming

http://imgur.com/ymUneDP

Sony may have won out of the established competitors but the Oculus Rift will be coming out this generation too. Given the support it has so far I don't doubt that it will become a major competitor, so it's too early to say Sony 'won'.

Although the Oculus Rift is exciting tech, I don't really have high hopes for a product that makes nearly every user feel nauseated.

As far as I know, the Oculus Rift isn't really a competitor in that it's not a console. It's not stand-alone. Doesn't it require a gaming PC to actually power the display? In that sense, it's not the Oculus Rift that's a new competitor, it's that the old competitor (PC gaming) has just gotten a new innovation.

Oculus Rift is a peripheral, it's not a gaming platform. For all we know, the PS4 might get Oculus Rift support in an update.

And that aside, the Oculus Rift, if anything, would just bring a new part to the battle between PC vs console gaming. It's not really related to this at all.

They said this about their used game policy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA

(for those who can't watch it, it sounds like they gave the green light for all kinds of used games and sharing)

Sorry what? A giant megacorp cares about the people they made this for? I very much doubt it.

If they had learned their lesson and cared at all they'd reinstate linux on PS3, apologise to George Hotz and all the others they sued (and reimburse them for their costs), and maybe apologise for the rootkit fiasco.

First off, the PS2 backwards compatibility was a feature of physical chips that was in some units and not others, and never got disabled by anything afaik.

But as to how Sony will handle indie devs. I view it as a situation similar to Apple. They are very hostile to the end user having root control over devices, but they are perfectly happy to allow any kind of indie games onto the platform. I don't think there is any risk of the sandboxed games going away.

Sony was the first to support indie development, if you went the official way, not hacked consoles.

Original PS -> Yaroze

PS2 -> PS2Linux with full hardware access, except for some professional APIs.

PS3 -> Here they went downhill with the graphics crippled OtherOS, while removing it altogether afterwards

PSP Vita -> PlayStation Suite

So although they are a bit schizophrenic in supporting vs attacking indies, the company does indeed have a long history already in doing it.

PlayStation Suite is more like PS3 OtherOS than anything else. It's incredibly crippled.

As a PS2Linux owner, I stopped caring when they released OtherOS instead of the support I was used to.

I just meant to list the legal possibilities, but as I said Sony is very schizophrenic in how it does it.

Doesn't it run on PSP/Sony Android Phones and PS3 though?

No, PlayStation Suite does not run on PSP or PS3. It runs on the PlayStation Vita and a very small subset of Android phones/tablets (not even 'All Sony Phones', unfortunately)

Yaroze -> only for other Yaroze owners PS2Linux -> Only for other PS2Linux users PS3 OtherOS -> shall not speak of this atrocity Vita -> I looked into this, it was closer to what it should be but I still found their TOS and approval process to be overly restrictive.

I really think the first true example of this was on the XBox 360 IndieGames marketplace, the threshold for participation was restrictive but totally doable for almost any developer. it's a real shame they seem to be dumping it.

>> I'd be immensely wary of Sony declaring themselves open to indie devs. When I was a teenager I did homebrew development on the Sony PSP. Sony did every damned thing in their power to stop it. To run homebrew, you had to either run an older version of firmware or root the device. Every time an exploit was patched, a new one was found.

>> This was then followed up by the PS3. After releasing with both the ability to run Linux, they removed both. You paid for a device with X, then they removed X

I'm not denying those were some pretty dick-headed moves from Sony, but in all fairness, none of it is even remotely related to Indie game development. Hacking the firmware to circumvent security features -no matter how noble the intentions- has nothing to do with serious game development, and Linux on the PS3 was explicitly marketed as unsuitable for game development. You couldn't even use the GPU for anything.

Indie developers don't want to mess around with hacked consoles, they just want to write games, get them in customers hands, and make money, through offically supported channels. It has nothing to do with homebrew development.

Indie game development isn't as sexy or craze-inducing as the idea of homebrew. Homebrew suggests a completely open and level playing field, and it ignites the imagination of gamers (even if they never attempt it themselves). Indie-game development translates to most as: instead of tens-of-millions of dollars and dozens of staff you only needs maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars and under 10 staffers. Not nearly as cool as the idea of sitting down at your PC and hacking together your own game which can then be run on your own console.

Keeping your fans/community thinking your indie support is actually homebrew in nature will benefit you and once you launch, the buzz isn't as important.

Because the indie game industry pre-App Store is so comparable to the indie game industry today…

Agreed I have a strong distrust of Sony practices based off my experience friend's experiences with ps3 and my own with the sony vaio laptops. Unfortunately it's hard for me to forget the image of the NSA tapping into my xbox because of its association with Microsoft. I wonder if Sony would be as firm about tampering by gov't agencies as it has been to it's customers.

Keep in mind - homebrew is not self-publishing. Publishing still makes Sony money since they are being licensed to run on the hardware. The indie devs were sent dev-kits like any other big name shop to do their work on (this is explicitly stated when Octodad was mentioned). Homebrew is allowing anyone to write applications on the platform, and understandably (though this is not what I would like to see) they are locking that down still because of the shadow community. If they make it too easy to pirate games, then anyone will do it - not just those able to root the hardware (no matter how easy it may be).

My guess is that the dev-kits are just being made easier to obtain - either via price point or whatever other restrictions are in place.

Remember how PS 3 let users load their own Linux then a year or two later they sent out a firmware update that turned it off. Like imagine buying a car then the dealership sends a rep over and takes the nice stereo out and installs a cheaper model...but doesn't give you a refund, or a choice. And this stood up in court?

It was actually close to three years later, but the rest of your point stands. I, too, am concerned about them "taking back" features I paid for.

That said, in the case of Other OS, I'm pretty sure the only reason they got away with it was because almost nobody used this feature. Indie games would hopefully be more popular, and hence harder for them to back out of.

Sony dangles these features like candy and they can take them away on a whim, but I don't think it will happen this time. Sony took away Linux because they were scrambling to plug any potential hole that would lead to piracy on the PS3.

Aside from curiosity, the foremost minds that opened up (jailbroke) the PS3 were motivated because of the lack of homebrew support -- the ability for hobbyists to run unsigned software on the PS3. Getting license to and legally develop for the PS3 is simply not a viable avenue for most people. Sony appears to have their bases covered this time in showing their support for indie developers. If it is easy, and most importantly accessible to develop software on the PS4, you won't see nearly the offensive to crack the system open apart from proof of concept, unpublished or artificially limited exploits.

> Remember how PS 3 let users load their own Linux then a year or two later they sent out a firmware update that turned it off.

It's unfortunate that the attention span of most users is as short. Aside from the Linux issue, the PS3 was decidedly hostile towards small game companies for a very long time (ridiculous development system costs, year long approval process etc.).

Source? I don't know of any small company that actually paid for devkits either from Sony or MS. Year long approval would cost hundreds thousand that small companies are not likely to afford.

The fact is Sony just has to produce a more "open" console than Microsoft and Nintendo, and it looks like they are doing that. Microsoft is a huge sell out, looking to control every aspect once again, and Nintendo have lost the plot completely.

There is a 4th possible contender that isn't owned by Sony, MS nor Nintendo. And personally I'm more excited about the Steambox that any of the other consoles (the ability to buy games once and play it on my laptop or games console depending on what room I'm in (or even if I'm at home at all) is very appealing.

Can't you do this already? I think alienware sell units designed for exactly that.

Possibly. I could also built my own HTPC to work with Steam like a games console. I've never really thought about it until now.

PS4 more like an appstore, the war of consoles has already been won. Congratulations Sony.

Companies like Halfbrick, Rovio, Firemint, Pixelbite and many many more were made by an open market on mobile. I am excited to see what games will pop up on PS4. They already had better indie exclusives like Joe Danger, Fat Princess and more. Good times ahead for gaming on the PS4.

What I don't get is being open appstores attracts developers and sells more hardware and subsequently more games. Why would Microsoft shut that down? Bigger economies always sell more.

Microsoft has a very long history of screwing up once they get on top. They're great when they're the underdog doing the chasing, they tend to catch up over time. Once they finally build a great product, you can almost always count on them royally screwing it up. Then the process starts all over again.

It tends to be Microsoft dumping money into something to gain their top status, then once they try to make a profit on it they mess up. Their profit maximization formula doesn't seem to have a field for "will this lose customers?"

Isn't Activision is publishing Rovio games on consoles?

Rovio wouldn't exist as it does without the success of Angry Birds on mobile and the open market there.

On consoles currently you have to publish 4 titles a year to be an approved publisher. So they need them probably to publish but I am sure they would love to self-publish their own or it is more beneficial to use Activision now that they are bigger or need the retail side.

Small and medium companies that are up and coming like Rovio once was need open markets and self publishing. They shouldn't have to sign over a large portion of profits because they can't launch 4 titles a year.

Open markets allow some companies to break through, most wouldn't be there without the mobile game disruption.

I don't get what you mean by "app store." You can't have a closed publishing model, as consoles always have had, and allow full access to console development by indy game developers and channel access through an app store.

This is another symptom that the marketing logic of consoles is off the rails. Consoles were closed devices because that's how console users could be made to pay for console hardware - through game prices.

For a couple decades, the economics of this worked just fine. Until just recently, developing for a console market of a few tens of millions was far more lucrative than writing for any "open" games market. But now, with billions of smartphones, which amounts to a crushing ratio of 2.x orders of magnitude over consoles, games for smart mobile devices are making a serious dent - enough so that Microsoft led with their "old people" passive media features for Xbox One.

It is an open question if the console economy can be sustained. Can enough be sold to make a viable market for game publishers? Hardcore gamers have PC gaming to fall back upon, so they will not save the consoles. The "living room PC" was always a loser, and it is hard to see how mixing that in with a console is now going to be a winner.

But now, with billions of smartphones, which amounts to a crushing ratio of 2.x orders of magnitude over consoles, games for smart mobile devices are making a serious dent - enough so that Microsoft led with their "old people" passive media features for Xbox One.

Do you have any evidence for this "serious dent" that smartphone gaming is having on the industry?

I don't see how the smartphone game market overlaps with the same market that is purchasing an Xbox 360 or PS3. If anything, it overlaps the handheld market, but the Nintendo 3DS is still selling very well despite competing with smartphones for people's gaming dollars.

For the "gaming" market (ie. people who play more than the occasional round of Solitaire or Angry Birds), smartphones are still underwhelming. Even take the Madden and CoD crowd that many gaming enthusiasts disparage. Why would they care about lackluster smartphone games?

If anything the smartphone market aligns with those who bought a Wii for Wii Sports and then hardly used the thing much longer other than maybe as a Netflix device. But that was never a long-term market anyways.

Plus, the smartphone gaming market seems to have a pricing issue where everyone expects games to be either free or $1. Can you imagine a game on the Google Play store costing $30+ dollars as they do for a 3DS or Vita? Let along $60 for a PS4 or Xbone One title?

First, you are right that smart mobile devices have the most direct impact on handhelds which were a niche within a niche already.

Second, I can't imagine a game on Google Play costing $30, never mind $60. Can you imagine a world without $30 games?

Third, those $30-60 games are only possible inside the closed console market. In this context, the idea of indy games on consoles is just strange: It is contrary to the way the console market works.

The point is that if smart mobile devices on one side, and gaming PCs on the other side peel away enough of the market, 8th generation consoles will continue the decline in unit volume that happened in the 7th generation, and lead to the end of console gaming.

You are comparing high end FPS games against casual games. When, in reality, console games are divided between dozens of genres. If everything else - fighting games, strategy games, CRPGs, simulation games, etc. are all fine on handsets and/or tablets, it's the end of consoles.

We still don't have any real details, mind. This could be anything from a fully open app store model to Steam's arbitrarily selective approval.

When they say they will allow X it means they will allow exactly X and no more, so I'm sure there will be approval. But developers may get to keep ~70% instead of ~30%.

It's hard to say how this will work out, but compared to Microsoft who has seemed to expend a tremendous amount of effort crapping all over indie game devs it's hard to see this as anything other than very promising.

I wonder if this is actually a good idea? Seems similar to one of the major things that led to the "Video Game Crash of 1983"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras...

Isn't it essentially the situation we've had with Xbox Live Indie Games and most of the games in Apple's/Google's app stores?

There's a tremendous amount of trash on those marketplaces. I haven't seen any indications that it would lead to a crash.

Probably not a crash for the market as a whole, but certainly not a good idea for a company who's console is struggling against the competition.

One of the major reasons I'm ditching the Xbox (I owned an Xbox and own two Xbox 360s) is because of the PS4's much clearer focus on supporting indie games.

And yes, I realize for every The Witness or Braid there will be 20 or more pieces of crap, but this isn't 1982 where we are trying to figure out what to buy based solely on cover art. We have the Internet, the stuff worth paying attention to will be filtered up to the masses with or without Sony's explicit help.

IMO, this is largely an urban legend. The crash of 1983 was almost entirely caused by first party developers (namely Atari), and very non-just-in-time retail inventory practices.

Yes, but what about the SDK costs? I believe special development hardware was required for PS3 development which had/has a cost of around $10k. If Sony is offering similar pricing for the PS4 SDK then what's the point of indie publishing?

Doesn't the PS4 support unity?

I think you mean Unity supporting PS4, and apparently it's coming: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/03/21/unity-coming-to-sony-con...

IIRC Sony gives free SDKs to indie stars. The full process is:

1. Develop/release indie game on Windows.

2. Sell a lot of copies (relatively speaking).

3. Sony gives you free SDK.

4. Release indie game on PS3/4.

5. For your second game (e.g. Transistor, The Witness) you can develop for PS4 in parallel with Windows because you already have the SDK.

That's hardly a good way to bring innovation to your system. Sounds like "Me too, Me too!".

That's not the PSVita process. I have a hunch this'll be a lot closer to the Vita process than that.

Can you enlighten us to the Vita process?

I've dabbled with iOS games but found it a tad boring as I love games with proper controls so the possibilities of this excite me.

It's rather similar to mobile development:

http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/PlayStation+Vita/news.as...

I haven't personally done it (though I'm considering trying it for a small-ish project) so I can't speak to how many hassles there are.

emmm, OK but Nintendo has already did that on Nintendo Wii U - inde dev can publish their game (after Nintendo's approval) without coping with any big publisher. It is funny how Nintendo is super innovative but often overlook (similar as Opera on the browsers market).

The Wii U didn't innovate on this: Sony has been allowing developers to self publish on the PS3 and PS Vita for some time now[1]. This is just a continuation of that policy into the next generation. Much of the news coming out of E3 for Sony has been "we're not changing our policies, unlike our competitor".

[1]: http://us.playstation.com/develop/

Depending on how open this is, this could conceivably make Ouya obsolete.

Apart from the hardware, market traction/marketing, AAA games.. yes having indie games on the PS4 will make the Ouya obsolete.

> Depending on how open this is, this could conceivably make Ouya obsolete.

The Ouya is perfectly capable of making itself obsolete, thank you very much.

imo the Ouya is pretty much obsolete. Current gen smartphones are more powerful and coupled with an HDMI cable and a bluetooth controller (from the PS3 for example) offer the same thing plus are portable.

Ouya is all about its own Store and ecosystem, games built for their system/controller etc and also its low price point. I still think it will have a hard time.

Current gen smartphones are 3x more expensive once you add a game controller. That's a pretty massive difference in market.

true, but the ouya target demographic likely has a smartphone anyway. Most of the mass market will probably never hear about the Ouya.

...and following the time-honoured Android tradition of platform fragmentation, Mad Catz is also releasing an Android console! http://www.geek.com/android/mad-catz-project-mojo-takes-on-o...

OUYA had the spotlight for a hot minute there, and they kinda blew it with crappy hardware, crappy UX, and crappy games.

I'm so enjoying this... It's going to be a blood bath for Xbox One. If we include the fact that the Xbox will be spying on you in the living room and most likely giving the data to the NSA it's obvious what we should all purchase.

I's rather not have the NSA recording my living room.

Online play seems to require Playstation Plus however. It seems they've followed Microsoft in this matter. So if your game is online, it could get interesting. Though from what I understand playstation plus gives steam level discounts to gamers on a console.

Indeed. It's not quite as cheap as steam (75% off), but if you keep your subscription up you'll get a bunch of free games that puts the subscription into "great deal" territory.

I was on the fence about it for a long time, but after the second time my console died and lost all my game saves, I wanted the cloud save feature. It ends up that since I bought the PS Plus subscription, I actually haven't bought any games. I'm a infrequent gamer - I play games, but not every day. My back catalog of good games is pretty big, so there's a lot of good stuff that comes through the freebie channel.

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/06/10/playstation-plus-e.... If you scroll down you see the discounts on purchases.

This month they gave out Uncharted 3, XCom, LBP Karting (I bought it when it was $10 for PS+ subscribers), and Deus Ex Human Revolution. Previously they've had Ratchet and Clank, Spec Ops: The Line, Sleeping Dogs, and a bunch of other big studio titles. If you bought just the titles for this month you'd spend at least $50, even at the cheapest retailers online.

In a time when the freedom on internet is top news and highly controversial, he who sells freedom is in a lucrative business.

If Sony does maintains significant advantage on the freedom of its users, they will crush Microsoft. It's not even going to be funny.

Will they be shipping something like XNA? Will they be using C# or other managed languages at engine level?

Is getting a devkit getting any easier / cheaper? Apple got to where it was by opening up the ios development to everyone and not requiring an arcane process to become an approved developer.

> not requiring an arcane process

Xcode?

It'll be interesting to see what kind of restrictions they'll have on account access, networking, DLC and so forth.

Sony is infamous for saying things like this, then screwing people with the details.

Welp, I know what console I'm buying next. I haven't purchased a gaming console since the very first PS2s that hit eBay before xmas that year, but I think it's once again time.

yeah, you still have to hope it will be easy to program this stuff. and let's see the technical details on that too.

Relevant. "We're Indie, we like Microsoft. Too Controversial?"

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesSilva/20130523/192832/Were_I...

That the guy who has been getting what amounts to fairly special treatment since the jump (with The Dishwasher) likes the guys who created his meal ticket is not terribly surprising.

(Not saying he's wrong to feel that way, but his biases are stark.)

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