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Sony’s goal is to provide the best place to play, but there are always bumps in the road. Last year, the company was taken to task for its treatment of indie developers, with many citing poor promotion of its games and an obnoxious certification process as reasons why they’d rather release elsewhere. To be fair to the firm, it’s responded to feedback – in fact, even earlier today it launched a new Let’s Play series dedicated to spotlighting smaller products in its portfolio.

And now the company has announced a hardware loan programme, which will provide eligible game developers and publishers with a PS5 development kit and a PS5 testing kit, compliments of the company. While this may sound like a small gesture, it’s a potentially meaningful one: purchasing the requisite hardware to test and publish games on PlayStation can be a bottleneck, and this at least gives teams in that position a helping hand.

What does all this mean for you? Well, ultimately, more games to play, which is great. “We are always striving to lower the barrier of entry and improve the process for publishing on PlayStation,” said PlayStation Creators chief Greg Rice. “We’re pleased to announce a new initiative that will make it easier for new partners to hop in and get started with developing for PlayStation.”

In this day and age, you can never be sure where the next major hit will come from – after all, who would have predicted success stories like Rocket League [We did - Ed] and Fall Guys? Sony does still have a problem ensuring the absolute best content published on the PS Store filters to the top, but breaking down barriers so that more developers can release on the console is still a positive thing, so kudos to the company for introducing this initiative.

[source sie.com]