Sony intends to improve its relationship with indie developers. According to the results of a survey for PlayStation partners, the company plans to fix a number of obvious problems of its platform. We are talking about slow communication, low findability of games and opacity of work processes.What prompted Sony to respond to the problems?
Sony’s relationship problems with indie developers were widely publicized in July.
It all started with the thread of Ian Garner (Iain Garner), co-founder of the indie publishing house Neon Doctrine. He spoke in detail about the negative experience of working with PlayStation, including problems with communication and promotion of games.
Other indie developers joined the discussion, who also pointed out a number of significant drawbacks. Among them are the poor availability of games in the PS Store, slow communication with representatives of the platform, difficulties in participating in sales and outdated tools.
Sony itself has not publicly commented on the developers’ complaints. However, the company probably decided to listen to the comments of its indie partners and a few months later proposed concrete steps to solve the existing problems.
What actions does Sony intend to take?IGN has received a copy of the document “Results of the Global Partner Survey for 2021”, which Sony recently sent to some partner publishers.
There is no clear indication that the company is going to fix its relationship with indie studios. However, Sony talked about three target areas in which it needs to get better. In fact, each of them relates in one way or another to the problems previously raised by indie developers:
- Sony will simplify the process of interaction with developers, improve communication channels between partners and the platform, and also provide more transparent information about its activities;partners represented by publishers and developers will have access to better analytics on sales, engagement and promotion of games (the company also promises to improve the findability of titles on the platform);
- Sony will modernize the set of tools, as well as improve the ticket system, documentation and the work of the customer service department.
- Some indie teams told IGN that working with PlayStation has really become easier over the past few months:
- communication has become faster — the response now comes within a few days, not months (most simple tickets are completely closed within 24-48 hours);according to some developers, Sony has generally started to treat indie partners better – for example, the latest Neon Doctrine Lamentum game received a feature on the PlayStation YouTube channel without any problems;
- Sony has created a $10 million fund and is working on other initiatives to support indie developers – they should also help finance the porting of titles to the PlayStation;
- The PS Store has a “New Games” section, which displays all the latest releases regardless of their budget and category — this should also help improve the findability of titles.
- Despite the steps to improve work with indie partners, the platform is still far from ideal.
Some developers have noted that they still have to wait for an invitation to participate in sales. For example, Akupara Games was able to organize a thematic sale in honor of its fifth anniversary on all platforms except PlayStation without any problems. Sony still allows you to make discounts only at certain times.