bigboss370
Member
Over the years, indie developers have complained over Microsoft’s increasingly bureaucratic policies that are viewed as somewhat heavy handed. Hello Games once called Xbox Live a “slaughter house” for indie games citing the fact that Microsoft does not allow developers to self-publish. Instead they have to seek out a third party publisher such as EA or Activision at which point the money made back starts to dwindle on an already low profit margin.
Developers that can’t find a publisher may have the option to have Microsoft do the publishing (if the company is interested). The studio then has to make further sacrifices such as possibility of losing the IP and the right to publish on a competing platform such as the PS3.
Sony started changing some of this with the PS3 by allowing devs to self-publish. However, with the PS4, Sony is looking to take things even further by expanding this concept to its mobile platform. According to Yoshida, devs wanting to create indie titles on PlayStation Mobile can do so for free without having to purchase a dev kit and self-publish.
niiice. I think allowing self publishing is a brilliant idea, and would be great for cheap psn titles, and develops who publish on smart phones.
Apparently the reason The Witness became a timed PS4 exclusive was due to Microsoft’s lack of communication.
Jonathan Blow: "There were people at Sony who really liked the game and were keeping in touch with us about it, and so we naturally started going to their PS4 developer events, got a dev kit, and started playing with it.
I don’t have good communication with anyone at Microsoft right now, and haven’t been disclosed on their next console, but all our technical people like the PS4 specs a lot more than the leaked Durango specs, and we like the positioning of the PS4 (it’s about games) a lot more than what we perceive Microsoft’s positioning is going to be."
http://gamer.blorge.com/2013/02/23/...publish-how-the-witness-became-ps4-exclusive/