created or proposed or pitched and, yeah, I don’t see five thousand pitches. But luckily, I get to see so many games in development, and it’s so exciting. I get to meet with a way larger number of developers compared to when I was at first party.
So Sony recently revamped PlayStation Plus and there’s been even more of a spotlight on indies like Stray and Rollerdrome. How involved were you with that? Oh, well, I’m not directly involved. There’s a service team to manage PlayStation Plus. Before the new PS Plus we used to have two or three games included each month in the PS Plus programme. Now, that continues with the PS Plus Essential Tier. The Extra Tier has hundreds of games available for people to play. When we transitioned from the old PS Plus to new
PS Plus, we looked at the whole catalogue of games that were included in PS Now, and we didn’t just move these games to PS Plus Extra, we completely revisited the list and tried to create the ‘Best of’ collection of high quality games from indies to AAAs. So I believe over 100 high quality games are available in the PS Plus Extra Tier now. The service team and third party relations team are constantly looking at ways to refresh or add new games to the collections.
What are your long term goals for the indie initiative? What does it look like to you in say, five years? I’d like to see more exciting games come out on PlayStation and become successful every year, and that more fans of PlayStation find the fun of playing indie games. I believe that’s been happening. We put Stray, an indie game, in the PlayStation 5 showcase along with AAA games and people reacted strongly. I’d like to see more and more of these success stories happening on Sony PlayStation. I’d also like to meet new developers coming
from different parts of the world or from different backgrounds that have come up with new exciting concepts, and put those games on our consoles. So we are trying to make it easier and more streamlined for them to use our tools and systems to develop games and publish games. We want to see more indie games be more successful on PlayStation and have a larger number of fans of PlayStation finding those great games.
So for you, what differentiates an indie game from a third party game - when does an indie studio stop being indie? Good question. Like when Fall Guys launched, it was an indie game, published by Devolver, the indie publisher. But as the game became successful, Mediatonic was
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acquired by Epic. Epic is a huge company, and it poured a lot more resources into Fall Guys, and Fall Guys got much bigger. So Fall Guys is probably not an indie game anymore. So that’s the line. Fall Guys at launch - indie game - Fall Guys today - not an indie game.
What tips would you give indie developers looking to work with PlayStation? I also think a small independent developer should show their game to the public. I did a panel at PAX West a couple weeks ago and I was talking with people like TJ [Hughes] who’s making Nour: Play With Your Food and Jay [Yu] who is making the game Eternights, with dating game scenes and action role-playing scenes. Both of them have had the same kind of experience. They were posting their creations on the internet and someone who had the funds approached them saying “Can you make it into a game?” They were not thinking of making commercial
products, but because they were encouraged they thought “Uh, maybe we should do it?” In the case of Jay, he had a very stable job in one of the largest companies in the world, in smartphones ...and he quit that job and became a game developer, because that’s what he wanted to do. So things like that happen. I always encourage indie devs to show their work, so they might find their fans or sometimes even investors. That said, we’d love to see the games in early stages. So if they have a chance to come talk to us, we’d like to see the game, and we might be able to help them to promote the title out in the world.
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