Sony Indie Dev Relations Are “Amazing”

The importance of indie developers has grown a lot in the past year or so, especially in the console scene. With the initial drought of titles after the launch of Xbox One and PlayStation 4, indie games were critical in filling the space between AAA releases, as pointed out by Sony more than once. The Japanese giant has been hailed pretty much unanimously as the most friendly platform owner towards indies, and while the others have been making strides to improve, it seems like Sony is still leading in this regard.

Alec Holowka, a Canadian game developer mostly known for Aquaria, mentioned that his favourite console to developer for is Playstation 4 and Sony’s indie dev relations are “amazing” right now, mainly because they are easy and quick to talk to.

Apparently, they also contacted Holowka and his team - which seems to be the standard procedure, from what we’ve gathered so far.

What’s interesting is that two Microsoft employees asked him about feedback, which means that they are indeed trying to get more in touch with the indie scene. Holowka admits that he doesn’t a lot of how Microsoft does things know, but he recalls a very bad experience when porting Aquaria to Xbox 360 via Live Arcade.

He still has some feedback for both Sony and Microsoft, though: he would like the certification process to go away somehow. It’s a huge deal indeed as it delays patches, expansions & DLCs, not to mention getting in the way of crossplatform play.

Honestly, I wasn’t following Infinite Ammo (Holowka’s Twitter account), but his tweet about Sony’s indie developer relations being amazing was retweeted by Mixed Bag Games, the Italian developer working on Futuridium for PlayStation 4 and PS Vita. Clearly they agree with him on this matter, and I’ve found a bit more in a couple of tweets from a few days ago, where they praise Nintendo‘s indie program while maintaining that the push from all platform owners was mostly due to Sony, which remains the leader as far as indie gaming goes in consoles.

We’ll have an interview with Mixed Bag Games about Futuridium very soon, so stay tuned!