Sony's opening up the availability of Playstation 2 - still the most popular console in terms of play time overall - to university students. It's a great move, although not entirely altruistic as it's designed to make sure there's a regular supply of graduating students available, already neatly familiar with the Playstation development system:
You get the development software, the hardware, and the SDK to learn and experiment with. SCEA wants to make sure that students who are graduating from college are ready to program on PlayStation hardware and that means getting it into your hands.
(Yes, that really does say tool)
Still, it's also a bit odd because I hear that developing for the Playstation 3 is a whole different kettle of fish again. So either Sony expect the PS2 to continue to survive for, what, another 5 years (likely?) or jumping up to developing for the PS3 isn't as hard as I've heard.
Also note that they say "learn and experiment with", not "publish with". Does this mean we'll not be seeing any indie titles made by students arriving under a Playstation Edu brand any time soon? Nice subsection for Playstation Online, though, surely.
This means big things for the future of the likes of Dare to be Digital (we're sponsors!), which to date has focused on web and PC games. Perhaps in a few years we'll start to see Playstation 2/PSP (the PSP dev kit is being thrown in there too) "experimental" titles in there too, which would be double plus good.
(via /.)
There's a *lot* of devkits they had to manufacture for developers originally, and Sony owns them even after the devs have stopped making PS2 Games, so ... I'd assumed this was just a case of "we've got all those devkits lying around, is there anything useful we can do with them?"
Posted by: adam | June 09, 2008 at 09:25