This is really sad to hear... Do we know why? Is it due to the departure of Adam Boyes and Shahid? I don't understand. The indies sponsored by Sony were some of my favorite games last gen. It's a real shame they are dropping support
I've said it many times, but I too greatly miss Sony's involvement with incubated indie games and indie exclusives. Many of them, like Velocity, The Unfinished Swan, Sound Shapes, the PixelJunk series, and the Housemarque games, were favorites within the PS3 lifespan.
We can't say for certain since we don't know all the details, but I do remember Giant Sparrow signing a 3 game deal with Sony. Their 3 game deal seemed to be quite common, yet I think we only ever saw thatgamecompany, Housemarque, and Plastic release 3 games. I'm sure like almost all corporate contracts, they had clauses beneficial to the main party which allowed them to back out of the agreements. Most contracts, similar to Terms of Service agreements, are basically nothing since they often contain a clause stating that the main party can change the terms of the contract at any time if they choose to. You're basically just signing a blank page.
Edith Finch was supposed to be a Sony title.
Rime was dropped.
Little Nightmares never had a publisher mentioned when it was revealed as Hunger, but looking at Tarsier's past work with Sony, it felt safe to assume they'd publish it.
In an alternate timeline we'd still be getting a third game from Giant Sparrow, and hopefully a third game from Queasy Games who have been practically silent since Sound Shapes.
Vane seems like it would have fit well within Sony's past indie catalog too.
The fact that many WWS 'indie-scale' games are no longer published by Sony means it's a portfolio level decision, where those kind of game investments are replaced with VR investments.
I think it really sucks that Sony is no longer funding said games and moving the funding to VR games instead, but alas.
Another factor is that this gen has seen a lot more mid-tier publishers and self-publishing happening at a broader scale compared to last-gen.
Pubs like Annapurna, Devolver, 505 are supporting the development and funding of many indie games.
We saw the same thing with the Vita. It's almost as if Sony always has one too many irons in the fire. I don't really see VR working out in the long run, so maybe Sony will shift focus back to indies on their core console at some point.
Hopefully Annapurna will pick up the slack for now. Edith Finch was great and their upcoming games look great.
I think there is still a place for indies in Sony's portfolio. Diversity is never bad. The fact that so many small indie publishers are appearing and thriving shows that the business model can be profitable.
After the commercial failure of Alienation, I'll be interested to see how Nex Machina performs. It's fair to say that Housemarque needs Sony and Sony's resources more than Sony needs Housemarque. It seems to me that Housemarque doesn't know how to effectively advertise their games. I have no idea how they're gonna change it up for Nex Machina with a month til launch because I don't see a lot of buzz for the game. I do think Nex Machina will be part of Sony's E3 in some form, likely in a sizzle reel. Hope they have more up their sleeve to generate buzz than just that, though.
Reviews and the quality of Resogun will sell Nex Machina. Alienation really isn't in the same vein in my eyes, and felt more like a reskinned Dead Nation. Plus, there are quite a few of those style twin-stick shooters. Nex Machina seems like a worthy spiritual successor to Resogun, which I'd easily say their most unique and most addictive game so far.
Sony still invests in indies, promotes them, gets console first exclusives. If anything has changed recently, it's that I don't think they want to again get stuck with a "No Man's Sky" situation where despite giving Hello Games tons of freedom and treating their game like first party royalty, the game still got delayed frequently and still released in a very sloppy state. They took some of the heat for that, whether right or wrong. It was a major release and people associated it with Sony for how heavily they promoted it, so there was some backlash there.
The irony is that if you disregard the consumer backlash and deception and focus merely on No Man's Sky's commercial success, it was probably the most successful Sony indie game in terms of revenue. I really enjoyed the game, but I've always maintained that part of the reason it was so poorly received was because it was marketed on a higher level than the average indie game. The exposure it got attracted the attention of people who aren't really interested in indie games, and expectations were unrealistic. There were valid reasons not to like it, but a lot of the backlash came from people who are far more familiar with stuff like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Destiny than they are with Minecraft, Proteus, or [third even more obscure indie that very few know].
