The video game market is flooded with new games all the time and it’s thanks to indie developers. Small studios and teams of developers that have worked on their video game title for years hope that their work will get picked up, advertised, and enjoyed by potential players worldwide. Still, it’s tough to get indie games highlighted among all the other AAA video game news and announcements. That’s where Sony is stepping up their Indie Initiative.
The head of PlayStation Indies, Shuhei Yoshida, has taken to the PlayStation Blog in order to unveil the new Indie Initiative which is a means to highlight the very best indie games as they are brought up to them. It seems that this movement will also see indie games hitting the PlayStation Now market a bit more often as well. However, while the reception from the indie games unveiled during the PlayStation 5 video game highlight stream, it looks like Sony is wanting to showcase even more of these smaller games going forward.
While we don’t know if Sony has plans to hold indie-focused streams, we do know that later today a total of nine titles will be unveiled for PlayStation Indies. We’ll of course update this post with the games as they are fully unveiled, but it’s worth knowing that reasoning behind Sony’s push to bring out indie games into the forefront. According to Shuhei Yoshida, it’s all because of the amount of money these AAA video game titles cost to develop now.
AAA video game titles cost millions to make and it’s all done without marketing which means the risk to try something new or different may be too much for developers to bare. As a result, smaller indie games that have the ability to make something different, unique, and interesting may not only be a joy for consumers to play but an inspiration for other development studios as well. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that a former PlayStation head vouched for smaller games due to the cost of developing these massive AAA video game titles that take days to complete.
At the very least it looks like some indie games that may have released without much attention may get a real boost thanks to Sony’s PlayStation Indies Initiative. For now, we’ll have to see how well these indie games do when they are announced and released.