Ryan highlighted that VR is a key focus, and there were a number of VR titles at E3Īndrew said, “They’ve got to focus on VR, so maybe indies will be their primary content creators for the platform, but that cuts out all the indies who aren’t doing VR, have no desire to do VR or have recognised that VR across the board is not making anybody any money right now in the way that we all thought it would by this point. There is, however, a hint of irony to this shift away from championing indie games, as much of the game library for PlayStation VR and virtual reality as a whole has come from the experimentation and willingness to risk livelihoods on developing for these platforms. They need content for that hardware to drive further sales.” Sony’s flat out said it after E3 when people went, ‘Well where are all the indie titles?’ and they’ve gone, ‘Well, VR’s our thing.’ It would be very easy to have a knee jerk reaction and say Sony’s kicking indies to the kerb and they don’t care about them, but to be fair, they’re a gigantic business with a huge amount of responsibility and they also have one of the only VR peripherals out on the market that’s actually selling. There are market trends that come and go, and so absolutely, some platforms are now more into indies than others. “Every platform has had their Indie phase – Nintendo’s kind of having it now, to be fair. The accessibility of the mobile market has been completely saturated now, the accessibility of Steam has been saturated. The market’s just flooded across the board and the sort of indie goldrush has really come to an end. “I think that for all of the platform holders and for everybody in the industry, right now is an extremely difficult time. “I think the public statements come about because things are changing internally,” Andrew said to us.

It’s a case of the public position starting to reflect the behind the scenes changes in attitude that I have long heard of and suspected.

“We have VR to talk about now, for example,” Jim Ryan said. It meant there wasn’t space for indie gaming either. Jim Ryan’s comments to that sparked our chat with Andrew said, quite plainly, that while “There was a time and a place” to foster indie gaming on stage a few years ago, “it is less relevant now.” Sony’s focus during E3 was particularly narrow, with a string of trailers and announcements for a short 60 minute presentation, which surprisingly omitted the likes of Gran Turismo, Knack 2 and PlayLink.

Flatout 2 ps3