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 Pictures Entertainment sold GSN Games, the developers of the slots, two years after the purchase. Scopely became the new owner of the studio. The deal cost the mobile publisher “almost a billion dollars.”

The author of the bestseller “Blood, Sweat and Pixels” believes that the release of Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a strategic move by Sony. The company decided to close the autumn release window with a colorful indie project against the background of God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West transfers.

Players will have to pay extra if they want to play the titles already purchased for PS4 on PS5. This was announced by Sony against the background of the Horizon Forbidden West scandal. Horizon Forbidden West

Two weeks ago, for the first time in 33 years, all 30 places in the Japanese bestseller chart were occupied by games for one console. It became the Nintendo Switch. The Gaming Bolt portal has found out why this console has become more attractive to local developers and why they are no longer eager to cooperate with Sony.

Sony has prepared a report for the first fiscal quarter of 2021. In April-June, the company’s gaming direction earned over $5.5 billion. This was achieved largely thanks to the PlayStation 5 — the console stopped being sold at a loss.

Sony‘s gaming division is not ready to share a financial report yet, but it has already brought data on PlayStation 5 sales. The console sold 10 million units worldwide by July 18 and became Sony’s fastest-selling console.

Indie developers have repeatedly talked about the negative experience of working with PlayStation. Yesterday it turned out that the feature in the PS Store costs $ 25 thousand. After that, Sony was hit by a new wave of criticism. Developers began to point out many other problems of the company — including lack of support, poor game findability, and, as a result, low sales of indie games.

Today Sony announced the acquisition of the Finnish studio Housemarque, developers of Returnal. However, the Japanese PlayStation division mistakenly mentioned Bluepoint Games, the creators of the Demon’s Souls remake, in the announcement. It seems that the Japanese company was planning to announce the purchase of this studio soon.On June 29, Herman Hulst, head of PlayStation Worldwide Studios, announced the acquisition of Housemarque on the PlayStation blog.

Abandoned is an upcoming indie horror from Blue Box Studio. Almost nothing is known about the team or the game itself. However, thanks to fan theories about its connection with Silent Hill and the provocations of developers, it has become one of the most discussed projects of 2021. We talk in detail about who is hiding behind the Blue Box, and whether Hideo Kojima has anything to do with it.

Sony has officially returned Cyberpunk 2077 to the PlayStation Store. The game was absent from the platform for six months, and now it is sold at a reduced price. Despite the return of the CD Projekt project to the store, users are warned about the remaining performance problems.On June 21, the opportunity to buy the game again appeared on the Cyberpunk 2077 page in the PS Store.

The official release of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, a new PlayStation 5 exclusive, took place today. The project received rave reviews from critics, and the average score on Metacritic was 89/100 based on almost 100 reviews. Rift Apart is called perhaps the most beautiful game for today and is praised for using new technologies, but at the same time criticized for outdated gameplay in places.

Released by Sony fighting game My Hero Academia: The Strongest Hero earned over $4.14 million in less than two weeks. This is 80% of the company’s mobile revenue for the entire month.

Yesterday Sony held a presentation for investors, where it shared the main figures of the gaming direction and plans for the future. It turned out that PlayStation is going to “go beyond consoles” and focus, among other things, on ports for mobile and PC.

Sony has announced plans to significantly expand the audience of its online and mobile services. To do this, the Japanese company will allocate over $18 billion, which will be used for strategic investments. They plan to develop gaming services, among other things.According to Reuters, Sony will allocate 2 trillion rubles (about $18.39 billion) for these purposes within three years.

According to internal documents, Epic Games negotiated the purchase of 4-6 titles. Moreover, it is not completely clear from the wording: is $200 million the price tag for all the games or for each of them separately? If this is the price for one game, then in total the company was ready to spend up to $1.2 billion on Sony PC exclusives.

Sony for a long time did not want to support the crossplay function on PlayStation consoles, refusing to share its audience with competitors. In 2019, she changed her mind, but set a condition — game publishers will have to pay a commission.

Sony shared the report for the fiscal year (ended March 31). He became the best in the history of the company’s gaming direction. Revenue exceeded $24 billion, PlayStation 5 shipments approached 8 million, and the total number of games sold for the year was almost 400 million copies.The revenue of the entire company for the year amounted to $8.9 trillion ($81.7 billion), and operating profit — ¥971.9 billion ($8.9 billion).

Sony continues to actively develop ideas that, in theory, can facilitate the passage of even the most complex and demanding games. The corresponding patents of the company speak about the movement in this direction. Among them is an expert assistance system, difficulty adjustment based on machine learning, as well as an AI assistant for passing certain sections of the game.Demon’s Souls (2020)