Indie development is rapidly gaining popularity, and many consider it the pinnacle of creativity in the industry today. However, for all their merits, indie games face a major hurdle in the fact that they require immense effort and investments like every other project, something that may not be feasible for all teams.
Given the fact that the scope of indie development varies from team to team, smaller studios composed of a handful of developers can often struggle to even secure funding for their projects. Fortunately, one of Sony’s new patents could solve this problem in its entirety and offer something revolutionary for indie developers.
Published late last year, Sony’s patent, dubbed Cloud-Based Platform For Real-World Experimentation Driven Game Incubation, effectively aims to give indie developers all the tools they need to experiment and bring their dream projects to life.
As the patent describes, Sony recognizes the challenges faced when prototyping, testing, and evolving indie games. This also applies to indie developers hoping to transition from mobile platforms to consoles, since this shift can be quite daunting.
Sony’s solution is a cloud-based platform that significantly lowers the barrier to entry in relation to game development. As the company puts it, this platform would allow developers to go through the entire process of creating and publishing a game.
It is said that developers would be able to test all or one to two levels or activities of a work-in-progress game through the platform, allowing them to quickly iterate on concepts. This is to be made possible by the cloud service providing storage, compute power, and various other resources needed to develop a game.
Also mentioned in the patent is a streaming server used to manage live gaming instances.
As shown in Figure 3 above, this system, combined with the server, would effectively help indie developers deploy their games to systems owned by players, like consoles and PCs. Because of how the system is said to work, games can be deployed to players in their entirety or in small segments, effectively allowing teams to release them in small chunks through demos for feedback.
To aid indie developers further, Sony discusses a cloud-based game design studio with cloud-hosted toolsets and environments. Illustrated in Figure 7, this design studio would eliminate the need to rely on local hardware for testing and development. The patent also proposes the use of Machine Learning to simplify the process of asset creation.
Moreover, it highlights simplified game marketing through one-button publishing for short-form video content on YouTube, TikTok, etc., to reach a broad audience around the globe.
The patent even discusses the final stages of game development using this cloud-based solution, where developers can move toward joint IP ownership and console licensing to make their dreams come true. Needless to say, this type of system could completely change the landscape of indie gaming as we know it.
