Sony: Gaming industry "will stall" if we don't support garage devs

Innovation's not dead. It's just moved out of its ritzy bump-mapped mansion into a rustic forest cottage getaway. Or something. It's smaller now, is what we're saying - but no less important. In fact, according to SCE chief Shuhei Yoshida, the gaming industry absolutely needs smaller garage developers to simply stay alive - let alone thrive.

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

In that spirit, Sony's building its upcoming PSVita with an eye toward the iPhone crowd - that is, smaller developers in need of cheaper dev kits, touch tech, and digital distribution.

“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 explained.

Portable war arch-nemesis Nintendo, meanwhile, has spoken out against garage developers. Although, to be fair, the terminology's a little muddy, and Yoshida appears to be referring to the same indie devs Nintendo's more-than-happy to allow into its waggle-born empire's inner sanctum. Reggie Fils-Aime, meanwhile, was shaking his gigantic, boulder-crushing fist at actual amateurs - folks with no development experience whatsoever.

At any rate, the more support for small devs, the merrier gamers will be in the long run. On that note, we're just going to leave this link to Octodad 2's Kickstarter page here. Donate a few bucks, perhaps? The president of Sony Computer Entertainment implicitly demands it.