Develop It Yourself

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"PS2 Linux is still widely used in universities across the globe, and the industry overall benefited from waves of people who had familiarity with modern console development environments, and could bring their ideas and skills to games companies. Many game developers today started out by having Net Yaroze game demos on the cover disc of the Official Playstation Magazine."

Despite distribution via mag cover disc, however, Net Yaroze projects would always struggle to reach a commercial audience beyond its core of enthusiasts. It is in this respect that the indie development community has undergone fundamental change: with the increasing connectivity of successive generations of consoles, and the adoption of broadband, indie coding projects have the opportunity to achieve mainstream success like never before. The appearance of online marketplaces and the rapidity of peer review through web 2.0 applications have coalesced to create an irresistible ground for independent development.

Digital distribution is by itself a huge boon for the indie development scene, and it is no surprise that these are the terms in which Nintendo has outlined its WiiWare service. Delivering games from start-ups, independents and established companies alike, WiiWare is a distribution platform that allows developers to sell a game without the costs of storage media (discs or cartridges), packaging or shipping, substantially cutting down the overheads for such projects. As Rob Saunders, Nintendo Europe's head of PR, says: "Mr Iwata has for a while now hinted about downloadable content: that we want to help young, promising developers overcome the limitations of small budgets and team sizes to bring their games to the Wii."

The emphasis from Nintendo is on WiiWare as a means of avoiding the thorny problem of commercial liability: that many games are doomed forever to the drawing board because it's not obvious they will turn a profit when presented to a mainstream audience. Games that are not commercially viable in the current marketplace will become so via WiiWare's minimising of extraneous production costs.

However, while it's clear that Nintendo is courting the untapped potential of small budget development, WiiWare neither intends to establish a community of developers nor offers any shortcuts regarding development itself—if Nintendo has ambitions to expand in this direction, then the firm is keeping them to itself for the moment. It would seem the obvious thing to do: although the ultimate role of such indie development communities in the bigger picture of console gaming is still being formed, it's clear that the console manufacturers' decision to harness and shape this force of creativity could easily have a profound impact on the success of their systems.

Encouraging indie development on a console has benefits beyond training a new generation of programmers to use your tools and systems: the creative communities themselves have a huge commercial pull, as proven by their many internet analogues—YouTube being the obvious paradigm.

Holman is cagey about what Sony's next step will be in this regard: "It's very early stages so far—but clearly we are considering a number of web 2.0 options. PS3 is still a young platform—opening the platform to a wider range of Linux distributions was an important way to give consumers a free and easy way to dabble with Linux and harness the PS3's processing capabilities. We're carefully nurturing this first stage, but we have many ideas for the future, too."

For the moment, however, homebrew development on PS3 will be restricted to the console's Linux component—there are not, as yet, opportunities for individuals to create games to run directly on the PS3's native operating system, or distribute them over PlayStation Network.

"In terms of the Linux environment, there are no barriers for application developers, other than that their users must have installed Linux," says Holman. "However, to make applications for more general distribution to consumers, our normal licensed developer programme is available."