PSN Gives Developers A “Much Weaker Negotiating Position”

In an interview with C&VG late last week, Mark Morris, MD of indie developers Introversion said that the PSN gives developers a “much weaker negotiating position” compared to Xbox Live Arcade.  His title, Darwinia+ is currently exclusive to the Xbox platform and Morris goes some way to explaining why.  “When you’re a small developer you kind of have to go with whatever you’re offered,” he said. “I would prefer a world where we could put our content out on 360 and we could put it out on PSN, because I think that being able to do that is really going to enable small developers to take risks.”

“There are different challenges with Sony. With Microsoft your approval is given at the start, as long as you deliver what you said you’d deliver you’re going to launch, where as it’s not like that with Sony,” he explains. “Sony’s clearance for launch comes quite later and you have to invest quite a lot of time before you get it. That’s a problem because it means you have to invest a lot of time and effort and then you’re in a much weaker negotiating position because they could turn around and say ‘we don’t want it’.”  We’ve heard this before, too.  Basically Sony want you to present the almost finished game before they decide whether to approve it.

Sony’s PSN Store is definitely improving, and the Minis service is going from strength to strength, but hearing stories like this makes us wonder whether the approval process is still a little bit behind the times.

Thanks, MUKARKAR