Why Sony is eyeing indie developers for Project Morpheus

SCE Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida believes the future of Project Morpheus lies within the innovative mindsets of indie developers and hopes to provide them devkits soon.

Ozzie Mejia

March 27, 2014 2:00 PM

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Project Morpheus promises to take console gamers to virtual reality. Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida doesn't believe that big-budget studios will advance the medium, however. Instead, he believes innovation will come through indie developers.

"Actually I am very excited to work with indie developers because we've been communicating with third party publishers, and the typical conversations go, you know the developers in the third party publishers, they are really excited, but they say, 'Oh well, I have to get approval from the business side.' And it's very hard for big companies to approve something that no one knows if there's a market for it," Yoshida told Polygon. "But the indie guys are like, 'I like it, I'll do it.' And there are many indie games being created in the marketplace because of that."

Yoshida hopes Sony can reward indie developers' 'can-do' attitudes and inventive mindsets by providing the resources that they sorely lack. Though consumer units are not expected in the near future, the company hopes to begin mass producing devkits and distributing them to eager indie studios.

Yoshida states that Project Morpheus would only be available to active PS4 developers, but hopes that number will be in the 'hundreds.' He hopes to reveal more details in regards to developing for Project Morpheus on the PlayStation development website soon.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?