Sony's Adam Boyes on the PS4 indie 'lovefest'

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Sony has been courting indies throughout the history of PlayStation 4 and PS Vita, but on Wednesday it finally proposed.

 

It held the engagement party the same night, at its PlayStation headquarters just outside of San Francisco. There Adam Boyes, VP of Developer and Publisher Relations, revealed that more than 1,000 developers are signed up to self-publish on the system. And Warframe, from independent studio Digital Extremes, is PS4's second-most downloaded app - beaten only by Netflix.

 

Even if indie devs are the fashionable thing for console companies to be seen cavorting with these days, you have to admit that Sony made it happen.

 

They may not have been the first to discover these brilliant goofballs, but they were the first to give them their very own slick handheld to play around on - sorry Vita, Curve Studios knows it's true and so do you.

 

Is it a realistic long-term relationship? Can Sony hope to balance a multi-billion dollar business with the personalities that come up with names like Starwhal: Just the Tip?

 

Boyes thinks it can. We asked him how Sony expects to maintain a happy marriage with the independent community, and it turns out one of the oldest bits of wisdom still applies: always know when to shut up and let your partner do their thing.

 

CVG: Why are indie games important to PlayStation?

 

Adam Boyes: They're the heartbeat of the industry. Anyone that has an idea can bring it to market and put it out there and see what people think.

 

To me, that is the most important thing in this industry: sort of fostering creativity and new fresh ideas, and trying risky things, and stuff that big developers or big publishers maybe wouldn't try.

 

They're always taking risks and trying new things.

 

As triple-A costs and teams grow, do you see indie developers filling that middle ground?

 

The funny thing is, the whole 'indie' term is changing so much. A lot of studios, like Gearbox is technically indie, Digital Extremes with Warframe is technically indie, but what they're doing is on a different sort of scale.

 

Warframe for us has been incredibly successful. And that's a great example of a studio that was doing some work-for-hire stuff, but is now the purveyor of their own destiny.

 

So I do think that there's a lot of small guys that are getting bigger. Some developers, like Capybara Games, are over 30 people. So they're making enough games, and Double Fine is another great example of really talented developers that are making great stuff.

 

People that used to be buying stuff that was that mid size I think are moving on to this new fresh stuff. Social media's played a massive role, because now we can tell people about things.

 

In the past that middle area was filled with licenses, because licenses equal discoverability. And now social media has infiltrated that and become our discoverable platform.

 

What does that mean for PlayStation?

 

For PlayStation it means a rich, diverse breadth of content. From the very top, big Call of Duty and Destiny and Battlefield and Maddens of the world, all the way to Starwhal: Just the Tip or Nidhogg.

 

These things are all extremely important to us because they all do different things. I always like to use the food analogy: some people want to sit down for a 15-course meal, and some people want to have a yummy bag of chips.

 

I think all these games offer a different experience along that line.

 

 

 

Whole interview: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/461731/interviews/interview-sonys-adam-boyes-on-the-ps4-indie-lovefest/