What PlayStation Mobile Meant To Me

July 13th, 2015, 22:01 Posted By: wraggster

On June 17th, 2015, we released the last PlayStation Mobile game. It’s called Oh, Deer! Alpha and it’s an aggressively odd driving game about hitting as many or as few deer with your station wagon as possible on your way to grandma’s house.
On Wednesday, PlayStation Mobile is going away forever. You read that correctly. We released a game which would only be purchasable for one month, after which it will be completely gone. Call us crazy (it’s fine, it only makes us stronger!), but we wanted to give PSM one last hoorah.
But why should you care? Maybe you never played a PSM game! Maybe you’ve never even heard of PSM before this very moment. But to us at Necrosoft Games, it matters. It’s the end of an era of open indie publishing on console, with nothing to take its place.
The end of an era

PSM was a great idea. It was an accessible marketplace where anyone could release a game on PlayStation hardware (namely the Vita, and earlier in PSM’s life, Xperia smartphones). And at the very beginning of the fledgling platform, Sony took a chance on a few indie developers, giving them a small amount of funding to make small games. We were one of those companies.
While we only got a very limited budget – we had less than one programmer’s salary to make an entire game with – it kept us afloat for our first year in business. It’s possible that without that early investment we would not be here. Our first game,Gunhouse (which is still available), didn’t make us any money past that initial funding, but it proved to the world that we exist. It set us on the path to get a deal with Iron Galaxy to make Gunsport.
And it’s because Sony took a chance on us, and other developers like us, that we wanted the platform to go out with a bang rather than a whimper. We’ll go down with the ship, and people will know that ship is going down, because it was a good ship. Maybe it had a few leaks, but we loved it.
There was so much weird potential with PSM. For our last game on the service, we essentially used it as PlayStation Early Access. People can buy Oh, Deer! Alpha for $0.49/£0.32 (the cheapest possible price), and then talk with us about the future of its development, and where it might go. Open platforms allow for experimentation in the console space, and I am sad to see that go away.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/07/13/p...n-mobile-meant

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