For all their touting of Shadow of the Colossus remakes, exclusive Spider-Man open-world adventures and Kratos’ explosive return to PlayStation hardware at their latest E3 conference, Sony couldn’t escape the relentless wrath of social media critics entirely.
The company’s Interactive Entertainment division came under fire from fans for failing to include much in the way of indie content in its showcase on Monday June 5th, particularly when juxtaposed with the plentiful number of non-mainstream titles like The Artful Escape, Deep Rock Galactic and The Darwin Project unveiled by Microsoft at their Xbox One X E3 reveal conference
Enter Interactive Entertainment worldwide chairman Jim Ryan, who’s wasted no time in accepting an interview request from gamesindustry.biz to clarify why potent under-the-radar projects like Vampyr went unmentioned so as to let AAA franchises like God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn retain the limelight instead.
Referring back to the early days of the PS4 era when the console was first unveiled at the 2013-14 E3 events with accompanying indie reveals aplenty, Ryan says “it was just good to talk about [the indie scene]” at the time but calls this subject matter “less relevant now” in an age where new gaming experiences like VR are the talk of the town.
Seemingly so far down their agenda were such projects, in fact, that the global division’s commander-in-chief asserts how even providing them with brief cameos in the conference via small gameplay videos would have been “viewed as wasted time” by the publishers as they mapped out their showcase structure.
That said, Ryan appears equally keen to allay fears that this temporarily diminished role for the indie sector means a decline in its output on PlayStation consoles lies around the corner.
“You know,” he says, “right now, we have tonnes of indie content on the [PS4] platform. And the fact that we elected, along with many other things such as Gran Turismo and PlayLink, not to give it its own spot on the stage […] in no way means it is not important, or it is not there, or we don’t worry about it.”
Whatever lies in store for the PS4’s indie offerings going forward, though, rest assured we here at D-pad Joy don’t plan on forgetting the oft-unsung wonders of the gaming industry anytime soon. Stay tuned for plenty more coverage of titles both as iconic as Assassin’s Creed: Origins and as up-and-coming as Inside and 10 Second Ninja in the days ahead…