Sony and The Unfinished Swan

So for this week, I'd like to talk about this CNN article titled "Indie video games get help from a 'big brother'". The general premise of the article is that Sony (makers of the PS3, one of the three major current generation video game consoles), is getting behind a tiny indie group called Giant Sparrow. Giant Sparrow plans on making a game called The Unfinished Swan where you start in a perfectly blank world and use the various buttons to paint the world behind you to reveal the background, which definitely sounds cool, but I'd like to focus more on that first part: Sony is backing them.

Now, reading this article is interesting for a lot of reasons. First off, I never knew that Sony also backed thatgamecompany, who made Flower and Journey. Both of those are widely lauded as some of the best indie games on the system, and that's not just because Sony backed them. They're good. Seriously. Check them out. (Flower is one of my favorites because it's one of very few experiences I've ever had where not a single word was ever spoken yet it still made me cry).

Second, I find it really interesting to believe that Sony is giving money to indie projects. I mean, here's a company who puts out titles like Uncharted, which has sold millions of copies, saying things like it will be a success "if they can get just one person to say "Unfinished Swan" has affected them". That's a huge difference in outlook. AAA titles with huge, huge budgets are becoming more and more common and more and more homogenized. Call of Duty releases a new $60 game a year that absurd amounts of people buy, and there are thousands of other clones that keep the shooting mechanics, cover mechanics, setting, etc. The worst part is that even other first person shooters that were different are starting to become more and more like Call of Duty because publishers think that "like Call of Duty" is what is going to sell.

This is why Sony putting money into indie projects makes me happy. Not only is it not homogenized, but it's not even all that profitable. I mean, college students certainly do know how to stretch a dollar, so as far as return on investment goes, it might not be too unprofitable, but indie games usually only sell for around $10. Any money Sony puts into The Unfinished Swan may be going into something most people will have never heard of. They'll probably make back their investment, but they certainly won't make billions of dollars in profit, so what does this say to me?

It says that even though Sony is obviously interested in profit, maybe they're interested in the art too. Maybe this is like the charitable arm of the company, taking promising developers who really have the inspiration and the drive to make something great and granting them the tools they need. Maybe there really is room in the high-profile video game world for something as unusual and innovative as The Unfinished Swan, and maybe there really is hope for AAA titles to share the spotlight a bit.

Maybe.