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Despite Facebook’s entry into the virtual reality market doesn’t mean the sector won’t be led by indie developers.
That’s according to Sony Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, who told Polygon that pitching the idea of new tech to indies is proving more successful than trying to lure the big console publishers.
"I am very excited to work with indie developers because we’ve been communicating with third party publishers and the typical conversations go ‘Oh well, I have to get approval from the business side.’ And it’s very hard for big companies to approve something that no one knows if there’s a market for it," he said.
"But the indie guys are like, ‘I like it, I’ll do it.’ And there are many indie games being created in the marketplace because of that.
"The indie teams typically want to create something not directly competitive with big companies because they know they don’t have the resource to do it, so they try to come up with a new angle or approach, a new experience so that their game can stand out. And that approach is perfect for making VR, because that’s what we need.
We don’t want people to think, ‘How can I port this game to VR?’ We want people to think, ‘What unique thing can we do with this tech?’ So I’m very, very excited to give lots of units to indie PS4 developers."
VP of creative Lionel Raynaud earlier this month said that "VR would need to sell at least 1m units to be viable for development".
