Sony says that it doesn’t feel the need to pay for exclusivity

Do we feel the need to go out and buy outright exclusivity? Probably not.”

That’s the assessment of PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan who has told CVG that the combination of Sony’s own first party developer network and PS4’s market-leading position are strong enough propositions as it is.

I think the partnership we have with Activision on Destiny is a good example of where it makes really good sense for them, it makes good sense for us and it benefits our consumers,” he said.

When you complement those two things we think that gives us a pretty complete position in the market.”

The comments come in the wake of the fallout surrounding Microsoft’s somewhat muddled exclusivity deal for Rise of the Tomb Raider on Xbox One, as it later transpired, Xbox 360.

We worked really hard this time around just to make the platform accessible to smaller developers – it’s not having silly rules and procedures and bureaucracy,” Ryan added.

Keeping the paperwork to a minimum, facilitating access to development kits, having a development environment that’s fundamentally a whole lot easier to work with than it was last time around…

It’s that approach, which makes us friendlier to indie devs, and on top of that, the icing on the cake is that we will go out and look at a small number of games and seek to help the developer make those games as successful as they possibly can, and that support can take a whole range of forms.

It can take the form of financial support, it can take the form of having Sean Murray from Hello Games on the stage at E3, there are many ways to do it. We just talk to each of the indies that we really want to work closely with and find out what presses their hot button and see what we can do to help them. Sometimes we can, and sometimes we can’t.”