>> I'd be immensely wary of Sony declaring themselves open to indie devs. When I was a teenager I did homebrew development on the Sony PSP. Sony did every damned thing in their power to stop it. To run homebrew, you had to either run an older version of firmware or root the device. Every time an exploit was patched, a new one was found.

>> This was then followed up by the PS3. After releasing with both the ability to run Linux, they removed both. You paid for a device with X, then they removed X

I'm not denying those were some pretty dick-headed moves from Sony, but in all fairness, none of it is even remotely related to Indie game development. Hacking the firmware to circumvent security features -no matter how noble the intentions- has nothing to do with serious game development, and Linux on the PS3 was explicitly marketed as unsuitable for game development. You couldn't even use the GPU for anything.

Indie developers don't want to mess around with hacked consoles, they just want to write games, get them in customers hands, and make money, through offically supported channels. It has nothing to do with homebrew development.

Indie game development isn't as sexy or craze-inducing as the idea of homebrew. Homebrew suggests a completely open and level playing field, and it ignites the imagination of gamers (even if they never attempt it themselves). Indie-game development translates to most as: instead of tens-of-millions of dollars and dozens of staff you only needs maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars and under 10 staffers. Not nearly as cool as the idea of sitting down at your PC and hacking together your own game which can then be run on your own console.

Keeping your fans/community thinking your indie support is actually homebrew in nature will benefit you and once you launch, the buzz isn't as important.

If you watched the announcement I think you can get a sense that Sony has learned a lot from their past. You can tell that they cared about the people that they made this product for.

Something really striking about this whole Xbox One vs PS4 thing is how one sided the enthusiasm is (in favor of the PS4). It's all the more striking when you consider that the gaming community is one of the most passionate, fickle, and hardest-to-please bunch of people there are.

I think Sony really listened to what people really wanted and made something with those things in mind.

Just gauging the reactions from across the internet and from across my diverse group of friends, the PS4 is being received so incredibly well and the sentiment towards the Xbox One is exactly the opposite.

I've noticed this too. It's funny because the gaming community tends to be very polarized into fanboy groups for each console. It sort of weird right now because it seems like almost everyone is super pro Playstation. It's like the Xbox fans are pissed off and staying silent, and the Nintendo fans have just given up.

The fanboyism is rooted in nothing that has to do with the consoles themselves. It's neotribalism at its most blatant: it's the need to belong among a group sometimes reviled (usually, ironically enough, for the rampant and verbally violent neotribalism).

This is absolutely untrue. If you watched the Sony E3 presentation for example, the moment the crowd went wild was the announcement of used game support, no check-ins, and ownership of games. This is by far the most important reason the PS4 is getting so much support, and it has nothing to do with neotribalism. The presentation was incredibly well done.

What saddened me most about that reaction was that it was for the announcement of something that we have always had. The biggest reaction at E3 was to a non-restriction, not a game!

It's only for the benefit of all the people who keep saying "Sony hasn't confirmed or denied that they won't be doin the same as the Xbone"

That's not what I'm talking about.

OK, then, how does your "neotribalism" theory explain the very sudden dissolution of three tribes into just one, while at the same time casting the original three tribes as "neotribal"? I don't see how you can call the original situation A, then insist that the exact opposite occurring is also a case of A. Or at least not without a great deal more justification of that than just tossing out a single word.

Sorry what? A giant megacorp cares about the people they made this for? I very much doubt it.

If they had learned their lesson and cared at all they'd reinstate linux on PS3, apologise to George Hotz and all the others they sued (and reimburse them for their costs), and maybe apologise for the rootkit fiasco.

> the PS4 is being received so incredibly well and the sentiment towards the Xbox One is exactly the opposite.

It's probably because Sony hasn't said anything yet about their used game policy. I would seriously doubt they don't get publishers get their way on the Sony console as well just as they did on the Xboxone. Unless they want to shoot themselves in the foot and lose publishers support.

Go look at the number one thread in r/gaming right now.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming

http://imgur.com/ymUneDP

As far as I know, the Oculus Rift isn't really a competitor in that it's not a console. It's not stand-alone. Doesn't it require a gaming PC to actually power the display? In that sense, it's not the Oculus Rift that's a new competitor, it's that the old competitor (PC gaming) has just gotten a new innovation.

Oculus Rift is a peripheral, it's not a gaming platform. For all we know, the PS4 might get Oculus Rift support in an update.

And that aside, the Oculus Rift, if anything, would just bring a new part to the battle between PC vs console gaming. It's not really related to this at all.

Although the Oculus Rift is exciting tech, I don't really have high hopes for a product that makes nearly every user feel nauseated.

They announced that you can sell your used games if you like, share them with your friends, or keep them forever.

Essentially you can do whatever you want with your games; zero DRM.

Umm ... no one said anything about zero DRM. The existing generation of consoles have drm but let you play used games, sell games, etc.

They said this about their used game policy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA

(for those who can't watch it, it sounds like they gave the green light for all kinds of used games and sharing)

Sony was the first to support indie development, if you went the official way, not hacked consoles.

Original PS -> Yaroze

PS2 -> PS2Linux with full hardware access, except for some professional APIs.

PS3 -> Here they went downhill with the graphics crippled OtherOS, while removing it altogether afterwards

PSP Vita -> PlayStation Suite

So although they are a bit schizophrenic in supporting vs attacking indies, the company does indeed have a long history already in doing it.

Yaroze -> only for other Yaroze owners PS2Linux -> Only for other PS2Linux users PS3 OtherOS -> shall not speak of this atrocity Vita -> I looked into this, it was closer to what it should be but I still found their TOS and approval process to be overly restrictive.

I really think the first true example of this was on the XBox 360 IndieGames marketplace, the threshold for participation was restrictive but totally doable for almost any developer. it's a real shame they seem to be dumping it.

PlayStation Suite is more like PS3 OtherOS than anything else. It's incredibly crippled.

As a PS2Linux owner, I stopped caring when they released OtherOS instead of the support I was used to.

I just meant to list the legal possibilities, but as I said Sony is very schizophrenic in how it does it.

Doesn't it run on PSP/Sony Android Phones and PS3 though?

No, PlayStation Suite does not run on PSP or PS3. It runs on the PlayStation Vita and a very small subset of Android phones/tablets (not even 'All Sony Phones', unfortunately)

First off, the PS2 backwards compatibility was a feature of physical chips that was in some units and not others, and never got disabled by anything afaik.

But as to how Sony will handle indie devs. I view it as a situation similar to Apple. They are very hostile to the end user having root control over devices, but they are perfectly happy to allow any kind of indie games onto the platform. I don't think there is any risk of the sandboxed games going away.

Keep in mind - homebrew is not self-publishing. Publishing still makes Sony money since they are being licensed to run on the hardware. The indie devs were sent dev-kits like any other big name shop to do their work on (this is explicitly stated when Octodad was mentioned). Homebrew is allowing anyone to write applications on the platform, and understandably (though this is not what I would like to see) they are locking that down still because of the shadow community. If they make it too easy to pirate games, then anyone will do it - not just those able to root the hardware (no matter how easy it may be).

My guess is that the dev-kits are just being made easier to obtain - either via price point or whatever other restrictions are in place.

Agreed I have a strong distrust of Sony practices based off my experience friend's experiences with ps3 and my own with the sony vaio laptops. Unfortunately it's hard for me to forget the image of the NSA tapping into my xbox because of its association with Microsoft. I wonder if Sony would be as firm about tampering by gov't agencies as it has been to it's customers.

Because the indie game industry pre-App Store is so comparable to the indie game industry today…