Sony: Industry Needs To Support 'Garage' Developers

Sony's Shuhei Yoshida has continued to prove that he's the most level-headed employee at SCE right now, telling Develop that the industry will "stall" if it does not support garage developers

by Sammy Barker Tue 12th Jul 2011

Did We Mention That Shuhei Yoshida Is The Best Thing To Happen To PlayStation For Some Time?

As an industry, we have to support those smaller teams, and let them try out their ideas, Yoshida told Develop. Without doing so, the whole industry will stall, in terms of innovation.

It's a philosophy Yoshida thinks Sony has captured with the PlayStation Vita, providing smaller teams with cheaper development kits and a profitable digital distribution avenue.

Having the capability to sell their games on the network is key to giving those smaller teams an opportunity to come up with ideas, and sometimes invest their own money to come up with something special and have their projects meet with millions of users, he added.

Sony's already appealed to smaller developers with its PlayStation Minis initiative. The next stage of its "garage games" push will presumably involve PlayStation Suite — a cross-platform endeavour that will bring digestible PlayStation content to a range of certified devices including mobile phones and tablet computers.