Indie game developers have started questioning whether putting their games on PlayStation is worth the trouble. Sony’s reportedly unsatisfactory service towards these developers has caused some of them to speak out in a new report by Push Square.
It seems that some of them get better traction while marketing their games on their own rather than going via Sony. This seems baffling, considering PlayStation’s massive reach in the gaming industry. YouTube views for indie game trailers would receive a million views on the developer’s own channels, as opposed to a fractional hundred thousand on the PlayStation channel. What makes this worse is that Sony reportedly keeps the metrics for many of its marketing avenues under wraps, so devs have no way of knowing how many views a post on the PlayStation Blog receives for instance.
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Leveraging Sony’s marketing machine is one thing, but the report suggests that even getting a foot through the first door is a herculean task. A few of the developers spoke about how their requests for being included in PlayStation’s regular sales were met with “robot-like” responses even after following up for months. Developers cannot discount their games at will, the process apparently requires an invite from Sony to do so. However, these invites never came, despite them constantly asking about it.
These requests, or any other queries that the developers may have are handled by Account Managers as Sony’s end; however, it seems that they aren’t very easy to reach. “Our Account Manager and his bosses are excellent, but it feels like they are absolutely buried in work,” said one dev. “Email responses are extremely slow, on the order of weeks to months. We have a specific CRM category for Playstation to remind us to bug them to make sure things happen. Even then, it’s a stab in the dark. Usually it results in a 3AM frantic Twitter DM to a friend inside the company begging for something to happen.”
Critical metrics like day-one sales data would sometimes take upto a month to find their way to these devs, who have no other option except to remain in a “blind limbo” until then.
