Sony is preparing to introduce a new game development pipeline in hopes of producing a stream of low-priced downloadable games and applications for PSP, says a new report.
Develop said Tuesday that Sony Computer Entertainment Europe had exclusively revealed to the website at an E3 meeting last month that the PlayStation maker would be making a wide variety of changes to the way it does business with game creators. Sony's process of "concept approval", in which the hardware maker reserves the right to reject or modify software based on its gameplay content, will be "abandoned" for this new line of downloadable PSP games, read the report.
The quality-assurance procedures for these smaller applications, said Develop, will be shorter. These smaller apps would be placed in a separate area on the online PlayStation Store, it said. Combined with Sony's announcement at E3 that it would lower the price of PSP development kits, all of these measures seem poised to foster an environment that, while not* quite* as wide-open as the iPhone App Store, could bring much more digital content to the platform.
With Sony introducing a digital-only version of the PSP, something needs to be done to open up the floodgates and encourage developers to create as wide a variety of games and other applications as possible, in terms of both content and price. If PSP Go could only download the relatively small selection of titles currently available, it would be a rather unappealing platform.
Wired.com has asked SCEA for clarification on this story.
Sony's new development strategy for PSP [Develop]
