Report: How PlayStation Is Failing Indie Developers

Yes the Windows App store is embarrassingly bad, I can't understand how a trillion dollar company manages to fail so badly.

Last time I looked was a couple of years ago, I wanted a simple app that countdown an hour, i.e. to force me to work an hour before I have a break (with pause and keeps on countdown in negative when time is up and also remembers where it was if the PC crashes/or you reboot/accidentally close it etc)
Me thinking there must be 100s there, and there was lots of similar apps. I installed maybe the best 20 candidates
- Ignoring the ones you had to pay for (as its such a simple app)
- lots didnt even run, so why are they even on the store, don't they get tested?
- some had big footprint, CPU, memory, WTF for something so simple!
- ads, not fit for purpose etc

In the end I wrote my own, all up took an hour (had to look into windows forms, never used before), It was quicker than looking through the windows ap store
(image visible with firefox, no idea why this site has image issues)

Obviously the above app aint perfect (just suits my needs perfect) and I would never dream of putting it on an app store without first polishing it, but this is what happens with the windows app store (and perhaps steam, mobile stores) the barrier to publishing is so low, that its easy for anyone to publish anything that we get buried in crap.
No need to mention I have not been back to the windows app store in 2 years after that last unpleasant experience

 

It’s the price of entry to the most lucrative market (based on spend per user).

Isn’t this how any market works? You don’t have to have your product on their store, it’s a choice.

 

If it was the same as every other market, why would indies be saying it isn't the same on other markets?

 

Saying it's a choice is a bit like saying you don't need to have access to food, you can always choose to starve.

It's a tax. One that they're only able to impose because of their market position and the lack of bad press around it. Making noise about it is the right thing for indie devs affected by it to do, it imposes a cost to the behavior, even if it's not enough by itself to bring change.

 

It's nothing alike. You cannot live without food but plenty of developers exist whilst not being on PlayStation. More than are on PlayStation.

For what it's worth, the iOS store is no better or worse and that's the problem you have when you have a massively popular marketplace. There are a massive amount of developers and you cannot promote them all unless you only do so for a few minutes each which is pointless.

Not everybody can be in the limelight. But that doesn't any of the other reported practises this less shitty.

 

Honestly, I still think this is mostly about communication and agency. No one would be complaining about promotion or spotlighting if they could run sales themselves and Sony returned their emails/calls. But like anything now, once criticism starts flowing, every tiny complaint gets piled on.

 

? I never said it’s the same, but all markets have t&c’s ’ etc.

This is like not selling a product in Tesco because they have worse t&c’s than Sainsbury’s.

 

can i also add its ridiculous for asia indie dev to have JP physical address because the registration was handled by SCEJ? that was the case a few years ago. have not tried again.

 

yes this is bad, I assume you have to work with a 3rd party in Japan that handles it for you, (I've also ran into something similar a lot of years ago but for the USA, I had to have a physical address in the USA, I ran it through a company thats set up to work around this)
In japan I assume they partly do this cause they don't want to deal with language issues in communication