make games on PlayStation, they are all successful. So I spend lots of time doing that.
Yeah, I’ve also seen you tweet about indie games that you’ve been playing on handheld PCs as you travel around. I bought The Solitaire Conspiracy because you were playing it. Yeah! Oh, another thing. Every day I wake up, I check the news on the internet and Twitter, and when I find something interesting, a new announcement by indie developers or publishers, or some announcements from ourselves in our social channels, I tweet and try to help propagate the news.
So what do you do when you partner with an indie developer? What do you do to support them? Do you offer design notes, or is it like a funding and marketing relationship? Yeah, all kinds of support. There are a small number of games we as a company partner with, and sometimes you’ll see some games have some kind of exclusivity on PlayStation. Then in most cases we help strike a deal with the publisher or the developer when the game is self-publishing so that we provide the space in our shows like State of Play or Indie Showcase, sometimes PlayStation Showcase - or on the storefront when the game is coming out, to make sure that we get enough eyeballs on the games that we partner with. But there are many other games - high quality games - coming out, that we do not necessarily have a special partnership arrangement with. We always look out for those games and try to find a way to help promote those titles through different channels that we have, including store collections.
So do you have specific tools and processes in place to support your relationship with indies? Well, we have large groups called the account management team and the third- party relations team, and they have the day to day interface. They have a finite number of developers they are able to talk with and there are hundreds and sometimes
October/November 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 35
thousands of developers. So when we cannot have a human person to have daily contact, we try to provide an easy way for the smaller developers to be able to send in their news or new marketing materials to our platform, so that each team can take a look at the submissions and find great news or great pieces to put on our channels. There are a lot of improvements we want to provide in this process, and we are working on new systems and new ways to process things. But day by day, there are people inside PlayStation who are looking at submissions.
Okay. So on PlayStation 3 - I know that was a while back - one of the things I most enjoyed was smaller experimental titles like Fat Princess or Tokyo Jungle. Do you think indies have more or less picked up the torch now as Sony focuses on bigger cinematic experiences? Absolutely. Yeah. So when I look back, because I joined PlayStation at the very beginning, during the PlayStation 1 days, almost everyone was like the indies in terms of scale and team size. Like the Crash Bandicoot games that I was part of the production team on. That was, like eight people. When the team is small, the creator’s ideas come through to the final product. So there are many interesting games that came out during the PlayStation 1 generation. So, we’ve been a huge fan of these
interesting ideas. Like Tokyo Jungle. It’s such a strange idea, but it was a really fun game. That was definitely an indie title that Crispy’s created. They were a very small team of three or four people. Because they
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