While Microsoft and Nintendo are far from perfect, Sony makes their lives most difficult
More: https://kotaku.com/playstation-is-hard-to-work-with-devs-say-1847210060
After yesterday's industry-wide discussion of the cost of being visible on Sony's PlayStation Store, Kotaku has heard from multiple independent developers and publishers expressing similar frustrations and fury.
There were two main responses to our article yesterday highlighting one independent developer's frustrations with working with Sony to sell games on the PlayStation store. The first was a confusing number of people convinced that this was somehow part of an underground conspiracy to destroy Sony. The second was many indie game developers and publishers getting in touch to say that, yes, wow, Sony are far harder to work with and sell games through than anywhere else.
It's not possible to rationalize with the former group. We had confirmed hard figures on Sony's fees for getting any visibility on the PlayStation's in-built store, so we reported them. The conspiracy, disappointingly, ends there. However, the information about just how much worse it is for indies to work with Sony than Microsoft or Nintendo keeps piling in.
"Oh yeah, so there's Nintendo who supports you," one such response begins. "[Then] Microsoft who supports you and [then] there is Sony who supports its own AAA machine and gives a fuck about everyone else."
"Sony does not understand what indie means," an independent publisher tells me under the condition of anonymity, via Twitter DMs. "Not at all. For them indie is something in the lower million budgets."
"No platform is 'great', but Sony is particularly terrible," says another publisher to me via Discord. "They know it too—they've had a problem for a long time, and they've been telling devs they have a problem for a long time, but they've just never fixed anything, so the problem persists."
The issue isn't simply that Sony charges a minimum of $25,000 to be featured in a visible position on the PlayStation Store—it's that this is, for most indie games, the only way to be visible. Without paying, developers are reporting that games get completely lost, which many have told us is in stark contrast to both Microsoft and Nintendo's stores. While both offer ways to pay for prominence (although we've as yet been unable to confirm exact figures), what we keep being told is that they also offer many other free options too.
"We get people every week saying, 'Saw your game on the [Xbox] dashboard today!!'," a publisher of smaller indie titles tells me. "The Xbox UI feels like a mess, but in reality, it's actually kinda interesting that they just have so many different places and spaces to feature games."
Matthew Wright of WhiteThorn Games published a pie chart showing the percentage of sales across consoles, with Switch making up a good 60 percent, Xbox around 30%, then Steam around 7 percent and PlayStation down at 3 percent.
Cristian Botea of indie developer and publisher Those Awesome Guys did the same, showing a whopping 91.5 percent on Steam, 7.6 percent on Switch, with 0.6 on Xbox and 0.3 percent on PlayStation.
Another publisher who wished to remain anonymous told us some exact sales figures for one small indie release they named but asked us to withhold. The game sold around 20,000 copies on Xbox, compared to just 7,000 on PlayStation. However, when it came to releasing DLC, the Microsoft console saw 2,000 units shift, while, "On Sony, and [this is] not a fucking joke, until today, 7."
More: https://kotaku.com/playstation-is-hard-to-work-with-devs-say-1847210060
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