Sony is putting the focus on independent games with a new PlayStation Indies initiative, headed up by Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida. To kick off the initiative, the company will be debuting several indie games today, July 1.
In a note on the PlayStation Blog, Yoshida said that a new indie game will be joining PlayStation Now each month, starting with Hello Neighbor in July. He also name-checked the heavily-memed game Bugsnax that debuted at the PS5 reveal stream. The company is also planning to debut nine indie games coming to PS4 and PS5, which will be rounded up once all the reveals have completed. The first one, FIST: Forged in Shadow Torch, has been revealed in a separate PlayStation Blog post.
“The indie community is increasingly important for the future of the video game industry, as AAA game development has grown so financially demanding that big companies are finding it harder to take risks to invest in new concepts that may or may not work,” Yoshida wrote. “We trust indie developers with strong vision will continue to bring ideas that have never been tried before, creating whole new genres of games and advancing the art and meaning of video games. PlayStation has always embraced games with completely new concepts, like PaRappa the Rapper, Katamari Damacy, LittleBigPlanet, and Journey, and we look forward to seeing what surprising new ideas will come next!”
This is all as Sony prepares the PlayStation 5 for a fall launch, and Sony has previously stated that it will have PS5 exclusives, unlike Microsoft’s plan with Xbox Series X. A release date and price has not been announced for PS5 or Xbox Series X.
