PlayStation suite

Yes, this is exactly why I thought the timing for PS Suite could be just right ...

 

I believe getting PS Suite working is just the beginning of the journey. In a very real sense, Sony is right at the starting line.

They have not done anything meaningful to take PS Suite to the market. The previous PS Suite announcements are for naught. They are fragmented, confusing, and have no meat.

That said, my techie side likes what I read so far. It doesn't mean the program will be successful unfortunately. ^_^

The top question in my mind is: Can I target my PS Suite app for iOS ? (with or without help from MonoTouch or other tools).

 

That 20% time vs 5% revenue figure looks bad, but it's also a bit misleading. The salient question is whether you're actually making money on the Android version. If that 5% of your revenue represents $100K coming in and that 20% of your time is actually only costing you $10K in labor you're still making good money. And it's questionable that reallocating that 20% of time can actually translate to more sales on iOS.

 

Have to look at their hard numbers. If you read the full article, it has the overall conversion rate for iOS vs Android App Store (i.e., % of people who ended up paying for software). This gentleman may think his opportunity cost is huge. If his staff keeps going back to maintain the same thing, instead of moving ahead to create new revenue streams, it could be frustrating for a small company too.

In any case, PS Suite is a "backend" concept. The consumers probably don't care about PS Suite capability and compliance. What they want are the apps and games. From this perspective, Sony has done virtually nothing so far, other than publishing 1-2 press releases.

If it's just a simple App Store concept, then their conversion rate may be similar or lower than Android App Store.

 

Speaking of the devil...

PlayStation Store and games now available on Sony Xperia S
http://www.androidcentral.com/playstation-store-and-games-now-available-sony-xperia-s

 

Gofreak posted some new stuff on neogaf that he found. Kinda surprised it hasn't been posted here yet. Includes the pdf of the slideshow from the presentation, with a couple features that haven't been mentioned yet.

 

Neat. Only current disappointment is no camera and location api yet. They should hurry that.

 

Took a quick look. We already know most of the high level info. The slides fill in the details.

Compatibility with Cocos2D (derived from iPhone development) sounds interesting. What about the 3D part ? Hopefully, someone will do an article detailing PS Suite development for iOS.

The other missing element is HTML5/WebKit integration. IMHO, it is more important than Location API or low-level audio API.

The UI builder looks neat but I hope Sony can create an additional layer on top. Make it like LittleBigPlanet so that end users can use the builder to create high level widgets (e.g., FaceBook + Google Maps mashup). It's interesting that the UI builder uses default Vita theme to unify the look. Hope they polish the UI elements more though. The slider bar looks a little basic.

If it's just a plain cross-platform SDK + AppStore, it won't be interesting to the end users. It also won't solve Android's low AppStore conversion rate problem. It's best to roll it out with an end user social platform to drive and gather traffic.

 

so it begins

http://www.playstation.com/pss/developer/index_e.html

 

YES!

Awesome.

EDIT: definitely justified being in open beta, because a number of important details are either not clear or not finished at this stage:

http://www.playstation.com/pss/developer/openbeta/faq_e.html

It looks like you won't be able to do 'free' games, only fremium at best. I think I can understand this - Apple also went through a phase where the App Store was losing them money if I remember correctly. So this may change, but it may also be a problem, we'll see. They're clearly still significantly behind in certain areas, and they'll have their work cut out to catch up, but that this is out, and on schedule, is very promising at least.

I've nearly installed everything that's necessary to try this anyway, so I can get an idea of how easy it is vs other platforms, and what we can expect from it. Don't have my cable with my so will definitely have to wait till I get home to get the hello world on there though.

Forums aren't open yet - pity as I am pretty curious, but they should be open soon ...

 

Tried it out some. The UI Toolkit demonstration solution is the most promising, to be honest ... the rest of the examples are ok, but really, really ugly. Fortunately, the code itself looks pretty clean and easy to do. Emulator runs well on my work laptop (but that's a bit of a monster). But the UI Toolkit, while not perfect, seems to be A-OK and you get the impression that the Apps we've seen so far on Vita could have been created with them.

The development environment is quick, to the point where I'm not yet sure I'd care for the Visual Studio plugin version of it ...

Will have to wait until tonight to see how easy it is to get it onto the Vita, but it looks fairly promising so far.

 

Are there any websites describing it, or do you just have to grab the SDK? Android is really bugging me with its quirks, like animating a view's graphics while leaving the views interactive element behind. The idea of PSS is good, but we really need to see that there's going to be a userbase. Add PSS support for PS3 and I'm probably in.

 

So far as I can see the SDK tells you the most the quickest. Above all, everything is fast. This is probably one of the fastest things I've ever got installed and up and running for development so far. It's vastly less complicated than Android, more close to Windows Phone 7, but with the current Dev environment being much more lightweight than a Visual Studio, it's very quick to load the devenv, a project, and then build and run a sample project and start up the emulator.

There are certainly still some bugs (from what I'm reading in the forums) and some missing features, but overall it seems quite good actually, from the short time I've spent with it. You can get the apps/games onto your Vita pretty quick as well and they stay there.

In terms of userbase I think there's potential here for Android crossover, as this really seems a LOT easier than Android development (although there are still some limits - sometimes relatively basic stuff is still missing, like access to GPS data or getting the device orientation are on the to-do list, though mind you I can imagine the GPS thing, that's a tricky one to get right in terms of use, privacy etc).

I'd say download the SDK and give it a spin. You'll have it up and running and tried out most of the examples in less than an hour, and it comes with the docs as well.

EDIT: gaf thread discusses it with at least some screenshots of some of the better looking stuff. It looks like especially the GameEngine2D that was added relatively lately, is proving useful. Though the 3D stuff looks ok as well, and again relatively easy to do.

 

Yay ! Downloading right now !

 

Just started porting my c#/xna port of the bullet physics libraries and quite please how quickly most of it has gone in and built. Of course I haven't tried to actually put anything on screen yet......

 

anyone porting XBMC?

 

That was the first thing that popped into my head as well!

 

so does PS suite allow ppl to pass around the apps they made for free?

 

Right now you'd give each other the code basically

Later on currently Sony seems to require Fremium at the least, so no real free, those things still seem in Flux though ...

 

give each other codes? Like download codes for SEN?