Sony working to "improve the openness" of the PlayStation platform
Sony's Adam Boyes has said the Japanese giant want sto shuck PlayStation's reputation as a closed platform.
"Back in the PlayStation 2 days and the PlayStation Portable days, you had to be a full-blown publisher to get your content out to stores. Now we have the PlayStation Network and other digital destinations where people can purchase content," the vice president of publisher relations told VentureBeat.
Boyes said Sony now allows developers to perform data-only patching for free, rather than going through the expensive and drawn out submission process required for executable patches. He hinted that the company will continue to revise policies as it has with non-traditional publishing models.
"Originally, we had a different policy on free to play. Now we have free-to-play content and microtransactions," he said.
"We used to have certain requirements for publishing. Now we have none for developers to publish other content. You have to go through the process of submitting for concept approval, but all of these things are things that have naturally evolved over the console life cycle. We’re evolving more than ever now because the industry is evolving.
"I think there are a lot of examples in the Sony ecosystem, both in the first-party and the third-party, where we’ve already been changing and evolving our platform quite a bit."
Speaking of evolution, Boyes said how developers and consumers view an "open platform versus a very closed platform" is changing, too.
"If you look at back in the Genesis and SNES days, people forget that the PlayStation was the one that came along and allowed people to be a lot more free," he noted.
"I think it’s all come full circle now, as we come upon the sixth year of the PlayStation 3 console and we’re continuing to evolve our policies and improve the openness of the platform. I think we’ve done a great job of evolving policies and the platform and allowing these guys to have a direct path to the consumer.
"Our concept approval process is very light in comparison to what it was in the PS one and PlayStation 2 days. Again, because it’s a different type of developer. If you look at Shawn McGrath and Dyad, those are the kinds of games we like. We weren’t able to tell that story 10 years ago on PS2. So it’s cool that we can work directly with developers and allow them the ability to put their content out there."