PSPgo SDK still too expensive for developers
Indie developers are still complaining about the price of the PSPgo dev kit, even after an 80 percent price cut.
Sony the new PSPgo App Store a little while back, revealing that some popular iPhone developers like Subatomic Studios (Fieldrunners) were on board with the project and that the cost of development kits had been cut by a whopping 80 percent in an attempt to entice smaller developers.
According to Firemint (Flight Control and Real Racing) CEO Robert Murray that may not be enough - the PSP development kit still costs $1,500 USD even with the reduction. Apple meanwhile only levy a one-time $99 USD publishing fee, which Murray reckons will make the iPhone a more attractive platform to small studios.
"You can build iPhone apps just as long as you have a Mac for no additional cost. You don't even need an iPhone or iPod to start out - I think this has given a lot of individuals absolutely no barrier of entry to development," agreed developers from Johnny Two Shoes (The Heist) in an interview with GI.biz.
"The cost is also a factor for development time, you don't need months or years to build great iPhone applications," he added.
The worries were echoed by Normalware's (BeBot) Russell Black, who said he wasn't sure that the PSPgo was going to take off as well as Sony expected and that, since the platform has zero owners at the moment, he'd be reluctant to take the plunge until the platform had grown.
"If Sony's App Store also let you sell games to people with a regular, existing PSP model, that would be a much more attractive prospect," he said.
"There are nearly 50 million of those out there already. Even if you only sold to a fraction of one percent of those people, it's a significant number of sales. And even if the PSPgo sells great from day one, it's going to take a long time before it starts getting anywhere near those numbers."
What do you think of the PSPgo? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.
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Discuss in the forums Replyseriously, Sony, what are you thinking charging that much and expecting people to just jump on board without complaints. Surely someone at Sony must have looked at how much they charge compared to their competitors and thought "hmm, maybe we're charging too much..."
$1500 AFTER a 80% reduction compared to $99? Are they mad? that makes the original cost to developers £7500. I don't know what the dev cost for the DS is, but damn that's a big difference to Sony's intended nearest competitor!
Actually, that makes the original cost to developers around £4500.
sorry, that would be a typo replacing $ with £ accidentally... keys are, like, right next to each other :-)
1.) buy a normal retail 360
2.) download visual C# 2008 express and XNA game studio 3.1 (both free)
3.) make game (code on windows, and throw it to the 360 whenever you like, without too much difference in code)
4.) upload to community games after buying creators club membership (£60?)
5.) watch people buy your game (admittedly not many, since community games isnt very big atm)
Sony just unfortunately seem to struggle to make a dev friendly kit at times, hell the dev-kit PS2 ran a modified knoppix (i believe, been a while since I used it - though I have heard there were different levels of dev-kit with better environments) distro that depending on if you followed precise install instructions took a couple of hours or a couple of days (if you were unlucky) before you were even ready to code using the terrible built in IDE, let alone setting up samba and network shares so you could code on a PC and just send files across so you can build the makefile.
This wouldnt be a problem if other (arguably better) consoles/dev kits werent a) cheaper and b) have a larger market share and pool of potential customers to buy your games.
And so far as DS goes, I believe you can code and run homebrew games without having to buy a dev kit (using an emulator) since a couple of guys I know managed to make a really tidy demo of a game idea they had in about 10 weeks and put it up on an emulator (they were sticking to roughly the same time a professional studio would spend on a prototype for a pitch). On top of that, if you really want to run homebrew on a DS, im pretty sure that is what cards like the R4 are all about (barring the piracy market), just drop the game on the sd and away you go (although I am not clear on Ninty's stance on use of these cards for homebrew/games development)
I could understand them crying foul when it was $7500 but now what makes nintendo an exception?