It seems like you’ll still be able to access PSP stuff via PS3/Vita.
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Either people only just saw this or they actually just updated this page:
What does this mean for you?
When the PlayStation®Store for PlayStation®Portable (PSP) was previously closed in 2016, you were still able to perform searches and make in-game purchases. Starting 6th July, 2021, you’ll no longer be able to perform searches or make in-game purchases.What about PSP content that you already own?
You’ll still be able to download your previously purchased PSP content. You can download your previously purchased PSP content onto your PSP by accessing the Download List on the device.What about PSP content that is available for purchase on the PS3 and PS Vita stores?
You’ll still be able to purchase and play PSP content that is available on the PS3 and PS Vita stores. However, you’ll no longer be able to make purchases via the in-game store for PSP content.
So I guess besides being able to buy PSP DLC directly in-game even on a PSP itself (something I didn’t know was actually still possible) I guess it’s all staying.
good god don’t say such things lest they become manifest
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As multiple publishers and developers pointed out in a 2020 interview with GamesIndustry.biz on this very subject, indie support tends to shift across all three platforms, depending on whichever one is “winning” or “losing” at the time.
“History tends to repeat itself in video games, and we’re definitely seeing that again now,” said No More Robots founder Mike Rose in that interview. “Whenever a platform holder has arguably ‘lost’ a console cycle, they tend to then lean more heavily on indie developers for the next cycle.”
In a separate response in which he talked about the efforts made by distributors to promote indies, Logan also pointed out that the best features, sales, promotions, and other opportunities are largely for games that are already successful.
“It often feels like the rich are getting richer, while the smaller titles struggle to survive,” he said. “Distributors will say they’re supporting indie games, but what they often do is promote the successful indie games. 99.9% of indie games are not Hollow Knight or Binding of Isaac, and those games really are in their own tier. I feel we need to continue advocating for supporting indie games, and not just any indie games, but the low and mid-tier indie games that can benefit from the money the most.”
maybe the latter quote is obvious to anyone following the space at this point, but i’m at least glad whenever i see people actually saying it publicly. the current ecosystem is making the space basically reinforcing a privileged/highlighted class of a handful of already succesful prestige indies like Hades, Hollow Knight, Celeste, etc… and then everyone else. eminently predictable but still depressing.
i know no one’s pretending anymore that trying to get money or visibility off being an indie developer is anything more than playing a stupid whack-a-mole game trying to figure out where the leaking fountains of money are before they close up (and even most of the time that’s just a wild goose chase). but it’s still pretty dire to think about.
i’ve met so many devs in person over the past decade and knowing how disposable most of their dreams, their effort, their energy… really their life’s work is really hurts to think about sometimes. i really don’t think it has to be this way.
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Feels like a never-ending loop of trying to get store pages to tweak visibility on small titles. They get better, they get worse, but their priority is always to show the user a title they’re most likely to buy, which always means high purchase rate, which always means pleading discoverability is a tough sell, and moreover very difficult for fancy markov chains to do.
Sony needed a kick in the butt because they’re in a low period now. After firing their support teams and indie producers, they’ve just let it wither. Everyone’s happy with Microsoft at the moment because they’ll just pay you outright to be on Game Pass and it doesn’t hurt sales…yet. Steam is in a high period of visibility and has historically been better at surfacing these things.
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yeah, algorithms are hugely to blame, they exist to homogenize tastes in order to create predictable markets with predictable income streams. people are good enough at doing that on their own, when it is literally programmed into our current algorithmic way of life the outcomes can be pretty dire. I don’t know what the answers are
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i really believe indie devs need to organize together more and aim for far greater collective ownership/resource sharing rather than just trying to like… buy a lottery ticket into the current system and thinking you’re smart or informed enough to not fall into the same traps 99% of devs do (you probably aren’t). i think indie devs could collectively bargain for at least something better. this was something i was hoping GWU could do - focus on helping newer and smaller developers in particular. maybe it’s still doing that in some places. in spite of being someone sort of around that space i feel out of touch with what’s happening just due to being disillusioned by too many different things and just feeling out of place in general as a person. right now there’s stuff like the IGDA which is totally useless at doing anything at all ever. and indie publishers which may or may not be scamming people at any given time.
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That’s just becoming publishers, isn’t it?
And once you get there, and you’re struggling to survive, it’s really hard to find the margin to spend on those bets that don’t pay out, when it can kill all the other studios you’re supporting…
We keep getting slightly better indie funds, though, and more of them, and better-capitalized ones. And correspondingly, it’s never been easier to pitch a game and get funded.
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i don’t trust money that magically materializes from random different sources like this stuff does. best case scenario is it comes from other developers. but these can be unstable and easily dry up (unless it’s the all-too-rare ideal which is a stable source of govt arts funding). i’ve had convos with friends who have gotten support from stuff like “the Indie Fund” in the past and had a lot of issues with them. a lot of this is only interested in capitalizing off of what’s already there. a lot of people get way into deep and get promised things long before they know what they’re doing and then crash and burn as a result.
i think it’s a given that indies pooling resources behind something they share a collective ownership with and collective bargaining could help things out. that would prevent what often happens, which is one member of a team not paying others and causing massive problems because they’re terrible at running a business i.e. in the case of this recent game.
strong and supportive co-ops, unions, and stable govt arts funding are the only way out of this in the long run.
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I’m pessimistic that those forms will have any more support or lack any of the problems that our current funds do.
so you just expect new benevolent fountains of money to come about by themselves and improve things? cuz like, we are in complete and total fucking disagreement if that’s the case. the entire industry is brainwashed in a total techno-libertarian capitalist haze and more egalitarian alternatives have never really been tried to begin with. that was the whole point of starting a thing like GWU. the belief that these problems aren’t just going to magically self-correct and solve themselves, and that developers need to advocate for themselves on a much greater level if they don’t want to be one of the people eaten up and spit out.
and we have tried the spurting fountain of money model so many times already. i don’t see how people think you can play this game and keep squeezing blood from that stone. people are brainwashed to see fixing these as some kind of like algorithm or tech problem when it’s fully a problem of a) consolidation of power and b) little resources to support most people. it is utter madness to me to be still in the mindset that these things will self-correct. i don’t see how anyone can count on the benevolence of random people with money in the current ecosystem. sure, individual people you like might get lucky - but the burnout rate is still going to be catastrophic. i don’t see how anyone can think that’s a reasonable or valid status quo. i’ve seen way way too much to believe that. the system as it stands is not going to birth anything much better or more egalitarian without substantial organized efforts pushing against it. if i stand for anything in my life it’s the belief that things can and should be better.
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No, I don’t expect the situation to change by creating new structures with the resources of outsiders.
If we split these into separate problems:
Access - the ability of new and small developers to get training, funding, and access to an audience. This got worse and worse over decades until the late '00s because the fundamentals of how people played games favored large studios able to hold leverage against retailers, platform holders, and media. New tech fundamentally changed this as much as anything can; markets and audiences are more accessible than even the wild days of the early PC. It’s never been easier to make a game as tools have become truly great and free and computing power has gotten incredibly cheap. On the other hand, the paying audience for experimental works is as small as it’s ever been and has been entirely shut out of certain platforms. Media and social spaces have in many ways degraded.
Patronage - the ability of odd, interesting, unpopular voices to support themselves making what they want. We can measure this by ease of access and ease of support. The spread of cheap tools and knowledge has allowed orders of magnitude more people to be able to make their own games. However, though ‘games as a hobby’ can now exist, there are still relatively few people able to support themselves by making their own games over a five-year period.
I don’t think small developers banding together can change access issues because I think they are largely dictated by the structure of how games are made and distributed. There isn’t a sustainable audience for non-commercial games. And without that central fact, no re-organization or banded power can make those games support a living. Tech changes don’t make things necessarily better but they reshape things and some things might get better.
I don’t disagree with you that things ought to be better but I’m pessimistic that they can be by means like this. I focus on learning how people can shape themselves to survive so that they can use their energy and free time to make beautiful things. If that means they can only make those things on the side then that’s not surprising to me; when has this world ever promised more?
I hope this isn’t a goal of GWU because supporting noncommercial artists is not what a union can do. A game union is vital for studio work where urgent problems have real, attainable solutions: better, more stable working hours, an end to temp and contract work to skirt benefits, more equal treatment for QA, real grievance processing for harassment, and, just maybe, a guild-like cushion for the boom-and-bust cycles of project ends where they resemble filmmaking. It’s worrying to me how much energy in GWU is centered in indie studios with no viable path to support their worker in any way because they’re not viable businesses to begin with.
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i think “sustainable” means different things to different people - for most people i know doing this it doesn’t mean being able to live fulltime on games alone, it just means not having your art practice be a total loss: being able to get a decent computer to develop on, or more time off from work, or just not having to pack up all your art aspirations for contract garbage if an unexpected expense appears.
and within those confines i do think things like indiepocalypse or the queer games bundle (currently at $100k, split across 200 games - $500+ per person involved) or the haunted ps1 demo disks / dread xp collections (themed demo collections raising awareness for their various respective steam pages) are approaches probably more useful for the majority of developers shut out of professionalised game culture than any number of individual funds. even with government funding, a $5000 and $50,000 grant can require the same amount of paperwork and often the latter seems to be preferred as more likely to generate income and prestige for the funding body. which in turn means that it’ll tend to go towards creators who are already on a professionalised career track (which usually involves certain kinds of aesthetics, work practices, team size, credentialism, background, underlings to hurl staplers at etc). “professionalism”, or legibility to capital, is never neutral. the fact that all of these various types of funds or money spouts eventually turn out to hinge upon it has I think had the material impact of developers outside that system being pushed further from any support or visibility, while indie games themselves become frankly more boring and staid the further they’re detached from hobbyist energy.
i can feel pessimistic about the potential for horrible abuse in some existing collective structures, especially when they’re still ultimately directed towards profit, but i also absolutely think they also have a lot more room to contain and showcase more interesting work from a wider variety of people. networks owned and maintained by developers or critics themselves were the norm just a few years ago but those networks were gradually left to collapse in the rush for professionalisation (which turned out to involve an implicit turning away from any collective endeavour not linked to immediate profit). even without the prospect of an imminent livelihood from this stuff i have a lot more faith in systems owned by the people they were intended to support than i do by aspiring monopolists and platform rentiers who won’t hesitate to throw interesting work under the bus for the sake of a +0.05% uptick in wishlist conversion rates.
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also just to be clear i’m not saying anyone who wants to make art should be grateful for pittance, but what professionalisation in art means in the digital age at least is taking networks, aesthetics and ideas developed by people outside the existing art economy and then flipping them, enclosing them, into something people inside that economy can make money on. maybe a handful of people involved from the start can make money on it but mostly it’s gonna trickle upwards to anyone who already has money and contacts and can sit back and let other people take the risks, swooping down once all the KPIs are in. nobody who developed a hyperviolent twitchy flash game in 2004 is gonna be compensated by devolver for riding on those same ideas now, just as nobody making little artsy walking sims in 2010 will get a cheque from whatever boring blob guys currently do the prestige version of that stuff for annapurna. it’s always built on the bones of people who don’t count and who will get written out of the histories of this stuff when the next round of pioneers get canonized.
in many ways i think the best way to support uncommercial art is to just push for basic programmes that help everybody, artist or not, rather than hope you’ll be let into this club. but the very least that artists can do for their peers seems to me to be to at least be aware of this process and try to sustain structures outside of the “professional” world entirely, when that world only exists as a way to enclose and sell off the unprofessional art spaces everyone depends on while giving back as little as possible.
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Look at DDD: that’s entirely unprofessional and it’s going to be one of the best vidcons ever
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it’s like, so close
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i feel like we need to think bigger about what unions can do and should be because we’re at the point where the industry at large has essentially made scabs of consumers themselves
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I know the conversation has moved on but isn’t, like, every game a licensed game now? Or some corner of an IP ecosystem, even if the game is the original flagship product? Licensed games didn’t disappear, they sublimated into the default.
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