Awhile back Sony was ”fairly indie-friendly for a while now on paper, allowing self-publishing on PSN for more than five years.”

Now they have proven that the PS4 will be developer friendly and indies have been swarming in on the next-generation of gaming.

The account support manager of Sony Computer Entertainment America Nick Suttner says, “In the beginning we did a pretty poor job at explaining this, so we’ve spent the last 18 months putting the message out there that we’re a very open, easy platform holder to work with.

“At the same time, we’ve examined the process through the eyes of an indie, eliminating every roadblock and fee that we can along the way.”

He continues, “The indie PSN content and announcements you’ve seen so far this year are a direct reflection of those efforts. We’ve discovered the big secret behind indies wanting to work with you is this: don’t be jerks.”

What do you think about Sony’s statement? Comment below.

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They plan on getting as many games as they can out there, and one of those games will be a free-to-play title by Digital Extremes called ‘Warframe’.

The Creative Director of Warframe, Steven Sinclair was recently in an interview where he discussed the upcoming game, and the experience working with the PS4.

Sinclair states, “Independence! When we pitched the original idea it was too risky for the people we talked to. When we had freed up a few people (almost a decade later!) to work on what was next, we found ourselves coming back to those ideas we had to shelve.

“Free-to-play was a way we could start small and build something without taking a publishing contract and without losing creative control,”

When asked what was the motivation to develop for the PS4 he answers, “PS4 is a powerful console with great connectivity and online features. It lets us bring over our high-end visuals without compromise, with the promise of pushing it even further in the future.

“The PS3 was a great machine and the SPUs were insanely fast if you customized your code for them – with the PS4 the power increases yet at the same time being more generalized. We got our Warframe engine up and running in just three months on PS4 – it was such a pleasant experience… with Warframe being a ‘new’ franchise, I guess it just made more sense from an intuitive level to look to future platforms,”

The Warframe beta is currently available for PC and should be launch on the PS4 around the same time the next-gen console is released. Sometime in November, keep checking back for more updates.

What are your thoughts on the developer’s insight? Comment below.

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As a strong advocate of the video game industry, Weerasuriya was at last month’s E3 event promoting the new game, and giving a very interesting interview in which he bashed Gamestop’s business practices of making money from used games.

Weerasuriya states, “I think the problem is right now there are retail outlets that are really taking everybody for a ride. You can’t make a living at the expense of everybody else.”

He explains how the practices not only hurt the developers, but the consumers as well.

“Unfortunately, they’re not just making a living at the expense of developers but also the consumers because the consumers will see less and less games come out if developers can’t get revenue to make more new titles and keep going as a business,”

The developer goes on to tell a story, “I walked into a GameStop, asked for a new copy of a game and without telling me [the store clerk] tried to slip me a used copy and wanted to sell it to me for $5 less,

“I flipped out in front of the guy. I was like, ‘Dude, wrong guy… You’re doing this to the wrong guy’… There are developers out there who are making games for [years] and some of them will go down purely because the revenue stream is basically flawed and creating this place where developers don’t see even a little part of it.”

He continues for a solution, “I don’t think we should stop used games, but we should do something about getting part of the revenue back from GameStop and places like that. That’s not penalizing consumers; they’ll still get what they want.”

Do you agree/disagree with the developer? Comment below.

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Check out the statement below:

“[Sony] approached us actually, I guess it’s coming up to about four months ago. We were in our open beta and rocking the Steam charts there, and Sony got in contact with James, who’s the owner of the company and said, ‘Hey what would you think about bringing Warframe over to our next gen console?

“We had, probably, a 30-second conversation about if we should do it. [Sony] squeezed themselves to send us as many dev kits as possible and three months later we were on the [E3] show floor at PlayStation 4 showing Warframe playable. It seems that Sony, at least with PlayStation 4 … I mean you can see Dust 514 there as well, so they’re obviously open to experimentation even on PS3, but it sounds with PS4 they were willing to give it a shot with a developer like us who doesn’t have a publisher. That was a big surprise, and an awesome one.”

- Creative Director Steven Sinclair

News broke out on this when a man that likely resided in one of those two countries, asked an Xbox support worker a couple questions on twitter and was not pleased with the support’s response.

A man named Robert Hallahan asks “Does the Xbox One disclaimer imply you won’t be able to authenticate a disc-based game if not in one of the 21 countries?”

Phil, the Xbox support worker responds, “They would want to wait until the console is available in their region.”

He then asks another question, “But say someone from Poland, not listed, imports it from the UK. Will they be able to play disc-based games?”

The Microsoft employee again answers, “They would want to wait until the console is available in their region.”

This conversation is one of many that similar topics that are being questioned on Xbox Support Twitter page. Users have been posting screenshots of their questions and answers on a NeoGAF forum, and giving their input in the situation.

This situation is pretty ironic considering that Microsoft invited a Polish developer from CD Projekt Red to speak at their E3 press conference for their upcoming Witcher 3: Wild Hunt title. The developer forgot to mention that the game won’t even be playable through the Xbox One on his homeland when it releases.

When asked about the situation, the developer recommends for users to wait for further information and refrained from answering any more about the issue.

Microsoft has confirmed to Eurogamer Poland that their region would be available 2014, whereas Eurogamer Portugal says their region will unlikely be available this Fall but Microsoft will try its best to make it available in 2014.

The 21 countries that are supported for launch are:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Brazil
• Canada
• Denmark
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Italy
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Russia
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• United Kingdom
• United States

Microsoft’s disclaimer states, “Xbox One games are for activation and distribution only in specified geographic regions.”

Check out the screenshots of questions answered by Xbox Supports:

What do you think Microsoft should do in this situation?

The independent development team is located in a small studio in Finland and they have created downloadable games with popular titles, from Super Stardust HD, Dead Nation, and Outland.

Their most popular game is Super Stardust HD, which is available on the PlayStation network. The game has received excellent reviews from their great visuals to the amount of depth in its graphics and gameplays. The company has confirmed that they are working on a successor to their Super Stardust HD game for the next-gen PS4 console.

Community Manager of Housemarque Tommaso De Benetti says, “We try to build up a more personal relationship with the people who play our games and I think we are moving it piece by piece in the right direction. Housemarque fans are a really dedicated bunch, so it’s often fun to talk with them.”

The company talks about the time jumps of generations of console releases, and how innovative generations of gaming have been. They also mention the obvious differences between the upcoming games for the next- gen consoles, in comparison to PCs.

 “If PS4 and Xbox one on the market, many of these restrictions would be lifted so that developers have the freedom to take advantage of the variety of new technologies that can actually have an effect on gameplay – with the knowledge that everyone is able , best to enjoy it.

“An important difference of this new generation of consoles compared to high-end PCs will be their exclusive services and features. Think of PlayStation Plus, or the possibility to interrupt a game at any time and turn off the console – incidentally, my favorite feature of PS Vita! 

“This simple innovation is the way people perceive games in the living room, completely change. Also the possibility to easily share gameplay with other users will make some games on the console much more pleasant, because all obstacles are cleared away that might be lurking on your PC.”

Computer Units are processing units used for graphic calculations and general CPU functions. The PS4 and Xbox One will have one of these graphic chips in their upcoming consoles, which will be used for games where it can create a physics simulation from smaller functions.

Senior Programmer Jere Sanisalo explains, “These tasks include, for example, the collision detection, rigid body update and more. CUs but also do all other such pay-intensive tasks.

“This includes the simulation of soft objects, the simulation of liquids and gases, advanced audio processing and mixing, computation advanced animations, complex AI and path finding, complex visibility calculations (So that you can look, for example, only partly offset by a bush) and so on.

“While CUs are well established in the PC area for a while, their availability is with the new consoles (because each of them has CUs) increased tremendously. In addition, their simultaneous use has been simplified parallel to the graph representation, so that it is easier to weave compute and graphics calculations to each other.”

Controlling downloads and updates through special features and background services on the new consoles are going to affect the way games are developed.

Sanisalo states, “Every new platform has a certain influence on the games development. However, it seems the console manufacturers to be important that all these background activities are relatively easy to integrate into the game. With a little extra effort, therefore, can significantly enrich the gaming experience.”

The challenge of developing for the next-gen consoles may increase the costs of developing games, but not necessarily bigger teams. The best thing developers can work on is making their games better.

Benetti says, “In the future we will see more and more people, which will remove a little bit of realism. Because if you in that direction, is the effort to make a game look 10% better, not proportional to what it costs to achieve all that. In a way, that’s fine. In the coming years we will see many games that are supported by their style rather than their technique. You do not necessarily have something realistic effect, so it looks cool.”

Sony has shown numerous amount of support towards indie gamers, letting those companies self-publish and name their own price for their games. Whereas Microsoft has made it clear that self-publishing is not allowed for independent developers. It is great that Sony is helping the little guys get out there, not everyone wants to play mainstream games all the time.

“The past few years have shown that the indie community will not only win momentum, but is also of great importance for innovation. Certain games that would make a AAA blockbuster game does not make sense, can still function as a small, author-driven productions that might have a smaller circumference, but explore some aspects that are denied blockbusters.”, says Benetti.

PS4 will have 8 GB of GDDR5 memory, which means they have upper hand, because the Xbox One is going to have the DDR3 memory. This shows that the PS4 is going to have more bandwidth than tan the Xbox One.

Sanisalo explains why bandwidth may be important, “The way how the PS4 uses GDDR5, offers a higher bandwidth for demanding tasks. These include obvious as the graphics display with higher resolution textures or more sampling and filtering for visual effects – such as volumetric lighting and global illumination in real-time. Also Processor cores and CUs use the same memory – Calculation results can thus be easily shared between them. This will make it easier to distribute some demanding calculations from the processor to the CUs.

“As for the 8 gigabyte, I’m not sure but I think the price of the memory modules since played a role. However, there is another important variable that you should consider: The load times. Blu-ray drives do not come with the transfer speeds and hard drives will have their effort to come along since. So when it comes to games, will be the big problem is how best to load all data into memory in order to use it effectively. When considered as an upgrade from 8GB to 16GB would provide a great advantage less than the upgrade from 4GB to 8GB.”

Lastly, the community manager talks about the importance of features in the next-gen consoles, “It seems to me that common games in the future is always central. And not just as a co-op in games, but also by things like “remote play” if you need help at one point. It may sound boring for experienced players but look at it this way: if you’re really good at something, what keeps you from helping your friends, teach them something and make it as good as her own? I think that’s super cool!”

A few of the products based on the new Assassin’s Creed will be a novel published by Penguin Group, an art book published by Titan Books, and a strategy guide published by Piggyback and Prima Games.

The new Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag novel will be published by Ace Books here in the U.S. and will release on November 26th.

The novel will explore the Golden Age of Piracy, recounting the story of how Edward became one of the world’s most deadly pirates, while detailing how he was drawn into the battle between the Templars and the Assassins.

The Art of Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag will be available on October 28th, while the official strategy guide will release the same day as the game. The guide will include a finely detailed walkthrough, all of the game’s secrets, a story analysis, and multiplayer strategies, etc.

From there, the gaming site must ask for other permissions of the video, such as: put advertisements on it, a watermark, etc.

When a company gives a free download of their trailer, they are allowing someone to borrow their content, which means the borrower does not own full rights to it.

SpikeDislike 2′s developer Jayenkai made a blog post about why he is disgusted with IGN for posting his trailer on YouTube.

These are his statements:

“They don’t have the original. If they’d have asked, I’d have happily supplied it. But no, they instead downloaded it from YouTube. I’d expect better from IGN.

“Hang on a minute. Is that an IGN watermark on my video? Not only do they have the audacity to blatantly steal my video from YouTube, they then shove their own watermark on it, and slap it BACK ON YOUTUBE!?

“Is that an ADVERT? They took my content, slapped their own watermark on it, and then got YouTube to throw in adverts, so that THEY can make money from MY CONTENT?!

“For the record, it’d be nice if IGN did the right thing and started to give a crap about all us Indie devs. LINKING would be a start..

“Having a ‘Details about this game!’ page is great, except when the page doesn’t link to the app in question, and all the Developer/Publisher links simply wrap back to IGN’s site, under the ‘Independent’ section, thus clumping every single Indie game under one giant pile of mixed apps. Grrrrr….

“I might very well be “Independent”, but I’m an indie with 8 other games in the App Store. There’s no excuse for having the “developer” link simply link to a massive pile of thousands of games written by every other Indie dev under the sun. We’re not all the same person, you know.”

 

IGN has hidden the page from viewing, but this picture I took of my screen shows it was there for viewing.

With all that being said, I am in favor of Jayenkai. No matter what a game costs (even if it is free), that does not mean the rights to it are free and are yours. IGN ripped the video from YouTube, claimed it as theirs, attempted to make money off of it, and gave no respectful credit to SpikeDislike 2. I know how the gaming industry works, and I know IGN does too. Jayenkai deserves a very big apology from them.