Tell me about the changes you're making.
We've just changed our whole concept submission process. It used to be two stages, and all this feedback, and now it's just one, and it's optional feedback, so there's no greenlighting process, no voting, no weird stuff.
So is that just for indies, or is that across the board?
Everyone. Everyone, now, basically.
What I did, getting on board, went across the world and listened to feedback -- and said, "What are the biggest complaints, and how do we knock this out?" So that changed, and we continue to work every week on "what else are they complaining about?"
So if it's, hey, these guys are developing content for Vita, and we like the team, so we send them Vita kits as loaners for free. Or waiving patch fees for independent developers, if they need that support, then we're totally behind it.
How do you make that determination?
I don't like calling them "indie." I don't like making that distinction.
Usually the way we just say, if you're a digital publisher or a retail publisher, a disc publisher, and that's the main way. For our internal group we have Developer Relations, and they handle all digital publishers, and then we have Publisher Relations, and they handle all the disc publishers. That's kinda the way we break it down.
And studios, if they're small enough and scrappy enough, then they want to be indie. Then they tell us.
In the past, Sony was really hardline about getting approvals for concepts. It sounds like things have really been streamlined. Can you go into that a bit more?
Previously, how it worked, is that there were two stages. There was Stage 1, which was purely the concept approval, and then there was the second stage you would send in, much later on. And all of the different various stages of approval for putting your content out and putting a patch, basically your server ID would be given to you once you passed Concept Stage 2.
Previously what happened is you would get some feedback that was written by various teams around the globe, and compiled, and sent back to you. And we just found that when we talked directly to developers, and said, "Okay, we required you to respond to that feedback line-by-line, we required everyone to read them."And a lot of time when we talked to bigger teams, and even mid-sized teams, we said, how helpful was that feedback, and as we sat down with them they said, "We're paying 300 people to make a game," or 80 people, or 100 people. "We have a market for it, we have a publishing and marketing team, we do focus testing. Why do we need your feedback?"
And it made us realize that, why are we creating feedback for partners? If they want it, they can get it. That was the first big change. Let's make it a checklist. So they absolutely have to adhere to one of our main pillars for our platforms.
And then the second part was, why do we need it to be two stages? Realistically, if we want to be a facilitator for content, we want to get out of the way as much as possible. We obviously want to be aware. So now we almost treat it as, if we see stuff that we like, we're like, "Oh, maybe we can Pub Fund that, or we can do a partnership around that title." So that's more of an accounting task, whereas in the past it was an editorial staff task. And that's why guys like Nick Suttner who were hired into the eval group are now account managers in the Developer Relations team.
