Playstation Mobile

I guess there'll be cases of a Steam title or somesuch that's too risque for iOS or Play but which could be ported to PSM. Good luck to Sony if they hope to grow their PSM business to a mainstream moneymaker on artistic merit though. How many art-house cinema's are booming cash-cows thanks to their artistic integrity? ;)

I assume Sony would point to something like Journey being one of their most successful PSN titles.

Anyway, obviously it's just one approach they're taking to indy developers, and risky here also just means that it's a low-cost investment. This can also be for a massage game such as is found on the Japanese store, that has little artistic pretention, and is risky in a more down to earth manner. ;)
 
I assume Sony would point to something like Journey being one of their most successful PSN titles.
On PS3 with 60+ million devices. Taking a gamble on a potentially low-interest title can be offset be selling to such a large audience that the 0.001% who buy it is still a significant number of sales. If your market is only a few million, you need a decent sized adoption which warrants a more mainstream title.
Anyway, obviously it's just one approach they're taking to indy developers...
Surely the very best thing they can do for the platform is make it compatible with PS3. Even just saying they are intending that would make the platform far more appealing. I don't understand why they aren't doing this. It's the singular most important and effective move they could make to establish PSM in one fell swoop. As ever, I'm scratching my head over Sony's policies.
 
We discussed this quite early on on the Beta forums. Currently, the very base requirement for a PSM title, is that it has a touch-screen. Buttons and sticks are optional, and PSM provides developer as well as user customiseable touch-screen replacements for them by default, where the developers basically don't have to worry about it no matter what supported platform PSM is running on.

When you start to support the PS3 as well, you'll suddenly basically have to require games to support buttons and sticks 'only' in order to make games that run on all platforms. This is not great. Also, there's a huge display size disconnect between Vita and Android phones and full size TVs. I did suggest that perhaps you could go a ways when you do cover PS3 + Move, as then you can provide touch screen interfaces with a Move cursor and support various tilting stuff, and that way you can still do quite a lot of things automatically, but unless you start doing dual-move stuff, you'll still exclude multi-touch and such.

Apart from the PS3 being memory limiting as well (split memory pool and even when combined, it's less than the Vita has - 256/256 for PS3 vs 512/128 for Vita), this would basically mean that you should be able to write apps that target either Vita and Mobile, or Vita and PS3, etc. And of course they'd have to rebrand PSM as well. ;) (where the M is for Mobile)

So overall, for now I think they're better off the way they're doing it at the moment. If they pull it off well enough and it has gotten enough momentum, they can consider doing something similar that targets Vita + PS3, or perhaps the Playstation 4 will solve these issues by having a default input method available that aligns better.
 
On PS3 with 60+ million devices. Taking a gamble on a potentially low-interest title can be offset be selling to such a large audience that the 0.001% who buy it is still a significant number of sales. If your market is only a few million, you need a decent sized adoption which warrants a more mainstream title.

I'm not talking specifically about Journey here, but while what you state is nice in theory, the numbers I've seen imply that the majority of these esoteric "indy" titles don't offset the costs in sales even with a 60M user base.
Some of this is because online game sales are still a really tiny portion of total sales in the console space.
 
...
So overall, for now I think they're better off the way they're doing it at the moment. If they pull it off well enough and it has gotten enough momentum, they can consider doing something similar that targets Vita + PS3, or perhaps the Playstation 4 will solve these issues by having a default input method available that aligns better.
Fair points, but I think that just shows Sony haven't thought it through. MS's solution is games and apps that play on all your Windows devices. All it needs is a dual control schema, or an opt-out for certain platforms, or even a requirement for joystick+2 buttons minimal with a default on-screen control interface for touchscreens. Treating mobile devices as separate is missing the trick, and when Joe Consumer can buy Windows apps that play on all MS devices, or Android apps that run on their Android TVs and phones and GoogleBox, discrete PSN and PSM titles will be an archaic inconvenience. If Sony are going to support cross-device applications then they should be starting from that. They should have a clear vision how to support touch-screens and controllers and mouse inputs, UI guidelines, and be promoting cross-device design and development, to offer a significant differentiator to propel the platform forwards.

Any word on the HTC and ASUS device integration? the WikiPad is out soon, but I doubt it'll do too well.
 
Fair points, but I think that just shows Sony haven't thought it through. MS's solution is games and apps that play on all your Windows devices. All it needs is a dual control schema, or an opt-out for certain platforms, or even a requirement for joystick+2 buttons minimal with a default on-screen control interface for touchscreens. Treating mobile devices as separate is missing the trick, and when Joe Consumer can buy Windows apps that play on all MS devices, or Android apps that run on their Android TVs and phones and GoogleBox, discrete PSN and PSM titles will be an archaic inconvenience. If Sony are going to support cross-device applications then they should be starting from that. They should have a clear vision how to support touch-screens and controllers and mouse inputs, UI guidelines, and be promoting cross-device design and development, to offer a significant differentiator to propel the platform forwards.

Any word on the HTC and ASUS device integration? the WikiPad is out soon, but I doubt it'll do too well.

How do you control the touch-screen based apps on google tv?
 
How do you control the touch-screen based apps on google tv?
Dunno. Could well be those apps aren't listed as compatible with Google TVs if they're not. That's how Play works, and that'd be suitable for PSM at a pinch if they can't come up with something more sophisticated. The main objective should be to get devs to move away from Android SDK and Win SDK and Mono and iOS SDK and onto PSM SDK, even if not creating mobile apps per se. If PSM was available on PS3, you'd get people creating 'minis' and PSN titles for PS3 and then porting to mobile, and vice versa like Plants vs Zombies. That'd eliminate a wall to starting into PSM development.
 
Shifty, this one might warm your heart ;)

http://blog.eu.playstation.com/2012...ile-alien-breed-returns-next-week/#more-96235

Alien Breed features:
Classic Mode – Play using the original graphics, music and controls
Enhanced Mode – Featuring enhanced graphics, audio and controls
8 new levels – entirely new levels that intersect with the original Alien Breed story
6 original Alien Breed levels
12 Alien Breed Special Edition levels

8164275280_ecf22c8460.jpg


Hope there will be more things like this in the future.
 
It did indeed. Would be great to see more Amiga games on devices. I saw Bitmap Brother's Z on Android and am very interested. As I have no device that can play PSM games at the moment though, I'm not terribly excited. :p
 
It did indeed. Would be great to see more Amiga games on devices. I saw Bitmap Brother's Z on Android and am very interested. As I have no device that can play PSM games at the moment though, I'm not terribly excited. :p

I somehow don't believe it will be only on PSM. Perhaps a few exclusive levels ...

Talking about things that could warm the heart, I just realised that Ratch & Clank All4One and Scott Pilgrim are free on PSN and they're both pretty decent as four player local co-op games go. R&C is a 16GB download though ... possibly the biggest downloadable title for me so far. But it's starting to be worth it for me - I played Scott Pilgrim together with my 4yo son today, and it was quite a bit of fun. I got the idea as he was watching a Lego imitation of Double Dragon, and I'd already downloaded Scott Pilgrim because I wanted to try it sometime.

Alien Breed is nothing more than a taunt for me currently as well - I can only hope that the Netherlands will come soon to the list of supported countries
 
Alien Breed isn't PSM exclusive; there's an iOS flavour already. Maybe that was developed in MonoTouch and porting to PSM is easy, plus the demographic for Vita should be highly receptive to the game I think.
 
Alien Breed isn't PSM exclusive; there's an iOS flavour already. Maybe that was developed in MonoTouch and porting to PSM is easy, plus the demographic for Vita should be highly receptive to the game I think.

Yeah, thought so. Checked, and it's 4 exclusive levels for PSM. Hope more of those will come. I was just looking for something in a few of my 'memory' boxes, and I've actually kept some manuals and other stuff, including my Amiga (600HD) owner's manual.
 
I don't think there have been any significant developments yet in that area. But they announced that now they have a stable version and the publication system is in place, they would be doing a lot of rework and that the suggestions and kudos for them on the developer forum would inform their priorities on what to do. Stuff like support for PSN, Trophies are high on that list, but CPU performance and such are also really high up that list. I also have some hope that we'll find an HTML5 control in there soon, now that Firmware 2.0 has a good HTML5 browser.
 
Some good updates:

SDK 1.10.00 (Beta Version) has been released.

Limitations

You cannot create master packages(.psmp) nor submit them with this version as SDK 1.10.00 is a beta version. You can submit them by rebuilding with SDK 1.11.00 which will be released in the middle of March 2013.
SDK 1.00.02 and SDK 1.10.00 cannot be installed together.

Changes in Version 1.10.00

PS3(TM) wireless controller is available on PC Simulator.
Screen can be scaled and rendered automatically when actual device screen size is different from specified size in the program.
ADPCM format supported in Sound class.
New APIs added to SourPlayer and BgmPlayer.
Camera and Location APIs added.
Improved CPU performance on PlayStation(R)Vita.
Fixed some issues of HTTP/HTTPS connection.
Fixed other issues.

Limitations of SDK 1.00.00/01/02

SDK 1.00.00/01/02 will be usable for submission until SDK 1.11.00 has been released. The submission function will not be usable within a week after the release of SDK 1.11.00.

SDK 1.11.00

SDK 1.11.00 will be released in the middle of March 2013. The submission function will be enabled a week later.

You can download the SDK 1.10.00 from the PSM Dev Portal (Registration and sign in required) :

PSM Dev Portal
https://psm.playstation.net/
 
Scaling, camera and location API are great addition. Same for Vita optimization. The initial PS Mobile release was rather simple.

Is it still stuck with HTTP I/O ? If so, I suspect they will add PS Cloud integration next.

Then please please consider iOS port. The program will gain significant relevance/mindshare and user base once Sony does that.

As for paying Apple, they can start with subscription model like Music Unlimited first. MU is usable on iOS provided the users subscribed on PSN first. PS+ free games already work similarly.
 
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