Playstation versus the Indie scene

The Crimes of Platform X

As much as us enthusiast types like to watch from the side-lines, learn what we can and work to deduce the rest, there's a great deal of insider information in the video game industry that'll simply never become public knowledge for some reason or another. Maybe it's a situation of pride, where developers have a professional distance they like to maintain to the everyman because it makes their work feel all the more mysterious and beyond them, maybe it's a much more functional point of contract rules and not breaking NDA's; and every now and then it's because the topic at hand is just too risky to talk about for fear of tangible backlash. Whatever the excuse, the inevitable result is that the general public go unaware of the weird quirks of the industry that they love and sometimes, without that public scrutiny, some status quo scenarios that are less than stellar go unchallenged. Today isn't about one of those times.

For you see, not so recently there was a certain developer for a certain indie publisher who found themselves in such a conundrum as I described, where the consequence for speaking up could be dire, but they swallowed it up and spoke out anyway. Note that I'm being vague, and that is intentional, because in an almost facetious fashion I'm being just as vague as the Twitter user/ Developer who started this ball rolling, a fellow we'll refer to as Mr Garner. (he founded a publisher who have a lot of games under their belt, but the only one I recognised was the 'Simulacra' games, which are very well made) Mr Garner, in his introduction to this topic, stated that he knew some bridges were about to be burned before he even started, but he reasoned that with how little traffic made use of that bridge to begin with there would be no great loss to the wider economy. And thus he started a thread ripping onto the awfully archaic treatment of indies by one Platform X.

Yeah, we'll going all 'undercover conspiracy' with this one, digging into garbage bins and plotting red-string maps on the wall trying to figure out which of the major games distributors our makeshift whistleblower here is taking aim at under the guise of 'Platform X'. He specifically claimed that he wouldn't be defining them, afterall, despite the fact that they'd probably know he's talking about them and thus be just as eager to cut ties. Still, mystery abounds! Except the mystery isn't all that, considering Mr Garner was helpful enough to tell us that this Platform X is 'the operator of a very successful console and does not have game pass.' Wow. Way to be explicit there. I mean, technically he could be talking about Nintendo, but they've been leaning big on the indie titles this generation so I don't feel like they'd be the culprits. (Or >gasp< maybe he's talking about the Ouya!) No, this is Playstation, pretty clearly. Thus the following beef is aimed squarely, and yet indirectly, at Sony's front porch.

So what's the issue? Promotion primarily. Marketing is one of the most expensive ventures that any creative product can go down, and it's also the vector down which most funds are wantonly wasted under the vague assurance that 'meh, advertising isn't an exact science. Shotgun blast in the general direction of a target audience and you'll hit gold sooner or later.' (I'm being general of course, the advertising algorithm arms race is very real and very much dominated by Tiktok for the time being.) But indies don't have the funds to be throwing around thousands on fruitless ventures, so they have to rely on the mercy of grass routes marketing, striking it lucky through a third party, or getting appropriately marketed by the platform of choice. Apparently Platform X isn't holding up their end of solution C very much.

According to Mr Garner, Playstation offer absolutely no tools for managing one's game once they give it to Playstation, and they run people around in circles trying to get some form of promotion and/or feature, only to get the odd promise of a spot on the Playstation blog. (Apparently that's not the best spot for general visibility, can't imagine why...) He seems to also think there's a degree of personal bias in this system, as he feels that the evaluation which indie games have to undergo in order to be promoted are subject to the fussy whims of those that will just blanket refuse all marketing to a game they don't like the look of. To bring the public up to speed with the unique situation of peddling an indie game to Sony, Mr Garner even went to far as to list out the steps needed for a chance to be promoted. (A couple of points are, admittedly, beyond me. Don't know what a 'lotcheck' is.) There are trailers, blogs and multiple social media forms to deal with ontop of just developing the thing to begin with, which certainly seems like a lot of undue work to drop on the door of independent developers. (Most of whom can't afford to hire a fulltime employee just to parry corporate backstab moves like this)

Another big point of contention, and one which I think breaks through to all of us at home, regardless of any of our individual experience shaking hands with corporations rich enough to sear their name onto the moon with highpowered lasers, are 'Account Managers'. Enough said, you don't need to get into details. I can just hear the "Well, have you tried (explains the single most basic step possible that you'd have to have done anyway in order to make it to this point)?". I swear the entire point of 'Account Managers' is to keep you occupied so that you don't gum up the schedules of the actually important people, as they never seem to have the adequate amount of information and resources required to do their jobs. But I digress; the impression imparted it that the relationship between Indie Developers and Sony is very distant and impartial, which isn't really all that helpful on the side of the tiny indie devs who just want to get their game out there.

The bullet point that really blew me away, however, and might just change the way I look at game retail stores forever, is the fact that Sony doesn't allow for launch discounts without tacit approval. You heard right, Sony are the one's who decide when a game goes on discount. How does that make any sense on god's green earth? First of all, indie titles needs to be able to discount themselves in order to shape themselves to the ever evolving perceived value of the audience, it's pretty much a necessity. But secondly, if they're getting the 30% or whatever cut that they are, who the heck are Sony to tell people when they can and cannot discount their own product on the store? Apparently you have to get an invitation from Sony to access this 'highest of privileges', making it impossible to sync discounts across all the platforms and ensuring that PlayStation customers will always be the odd ones out when it comes to prices. (This whole affair has probably led to a bunch of indie titles not even bothering with the Sony headache anyway)

Now this all sounds like the disgruntled ramblings of one developer with a bad experience, but of course corroborations have come out of the woodworks with their own stories and charts. One I heard a couple of times was that indie games (at least for these folks) made more money on Itch.io then on the Playstation Store. How can that be the case? At the end of the day, I suppose what we're learning here is that it's easy to find oneself at the top of the pack and become this unshifting rock that's too scared to adapt for fear of losing it's dominance, but Sony are shooting themselves in the foot everytime they fortify themselves against progress like this. First there was the outright refusal to consider anything like Gamepass, then the active hostility towards any form of crossplay and now the alienation of indie developers; how long can they get away with fighting windmills? Good on everyone who spoke up and those who are lighting the fire under Sony's toes, even knowing that it'll eventually amount to diddly squat. At the very least it serves as an active lesson to other Platform providers out there how not to act.