Sony cares about developers, Sony VP says

At GDC this week, Gamesindustry International spoke with SCEA's vice president of developer and publisher relations Adam Boyes about, well, developer relations. He says Sony is trying to be more empathetic these days. "It's talking to them directly, it's listening to them, it's caring about what they have to say, and then it's actually taking that feedback and applying it to improving things."


He also said that talking with the developers is a sort of focus test for them, as they try to use the feedback they get to improve their processes to be even more developer-friendly. One specific thing they're doing, to that end, is waiving patch fees in some cases.

"Our publicized policy is that you have to pay patch fees in order to patch the content but the reality of it is, especially for independent developers, we don't charge that for them. We have not in the last three years in our territory. It's really important for us to work with them to make sure it's as easy as possible for them to get the content out there, especially if it's a fix for a game breaking bug."

Remember when Fez wouldn't be patched because the developers didn't want to pay Microsoft's allegedly exorbitant fees? Yeah, Sony apparently is trying to avoid that scenario.