Sony has made support of indie game developers one of the cornerstones of the Playstation 4 but that doesn't mean the console's online marketplace will look like iTunes according to Sony's Shuhei Yoshida in an interview released Thursday.
"So, if you are thinking about the situation that mobile platforms have - hundreds of thousands of applications - people say that it's very hard to find good content, or that if you make a game on a mobile platform you're almost just throwing a dice to see if your game, a great game, can be found by consumers," Yoshida told GamesIndustry.biz. "That's what people say about discoverability there."
"When we talk about being more open, about reaching out to indies and trying to get many new games made for PS4, we're not talking about these numbers. We're not talking about hundreds of thousands of games. We showed eight games at E3. Maybe we showed 15 at Gamescom - compared to tens of thousands."
Instead, Yoshida says Sony's third party relations teams are targeting independent developers that it thinks can build great games for the PS4 and building personal relationships with them.
"Because these guys, indie people, do not necessarily have business relations people or PR people - they're just so focused on making games - they like the personal connection," Yoshida explained. "If a Sony guy comes and says that we love your games, what can we do to help you to move your games to PlayStation - they're like, "okay, I feel very comfortable working with you". Very personal level relations can be developed. I think that's really important. From the very beginning, when people see indie games on PlayStation and try them out, they'll play quality games."
The PS4 is due out on Nov. 15.
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