Closure's European PSN release stymied by developer's "inexperience"

Closure developer Eyebrow Interactive has said the puzzle platformer's long, continuing European delay is its own fault.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Eyebrow's Tyler Glaiel said the delay was not the fault of either the US or European arms of Sony Computer Entertainment.

"[The delay] was a lot of inexperience on our part and not knowing what to expect. Sony didn't do anything in particular to delay it," he said.

SCEA and SCEE function as distinct business units, meaning developers have to approach and conduct business with both arms in order to have a game published in both regions. Glaiel said Eyebrow focused on SCEA because the team was offered a showcase spot in March and had to scurry to meet the deadline. Organising a European release fell to the wayside a little as a result.

"I didn't think it was going to take that long to get the European version done. I figured that it would take around the same amount of time or a little quicker than it took us to get stuff done with SCEA," Glaiel explained.

On top of that, the team had to work around timezone differences; the process of securing publishing and a PEGI rating takes a lot of emailing back and forth, and Glaiel noted that an exchange of eight emails can take a week when the conversationalists are on different continents, instead of a single day.

The European version is nearly complete, and Glaiel said it will likely be released by the end of the year. Nevertheless, he said that while he doesn't regret publishing on PlayStation, he's focused on the Steam version for now.

"Most people say Steam is the way to go right now. We knew how much we were selling on PSN in North America and it wasn't quite as much as we were hoping for, so we really needed to make sure we could get the Steam release going," he said.

Eyebrow intends to change the price of the PlayStation network release to match that of Steam, which he feels may help flagging PSN sales, but called Steam "a more promising platform", although he had nothing but good things to say about Sony.

Closure took out the grand prize at the DICE Summit 2012 Indie Games Challenge.