PS3 boss says, “third parties do things better,” top 5 PSN games, other PSN facts

At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference, a Sony boss shared several facts about the Playstation Network as he pitched the PSN / PS3 / PSP platform to third-party developers, concluding third parties "frequently do things better."

Senior developer relations account manager, Chris Eden, lectured potential developers about the benefits of developing for the PSN. We can thank Game Set Watch for covering the lecture.

It’s not that costly to get into the PSN developing business says the account manager. Sony has released a highly-supported, free-to-use graphics engine, which supports Maya, 3ds Max, and others on development systems. As for the dev kit, it turns out PSN developers can spring for the $1,200 debug PS3, which is similar to — but not as "nice" as — the full dev kit.

Eden spoke about some of Sony’s PSN promotion opportunities such as in-store banner ads, the PS3’s browser home page, the Playstation blog, weekly emails, and more, and he made a significant effort to point out the freedom Sony gives it’s developers.

Eden says, "Sony wants to manage, but not own the platform," and he promised devs creative control, large royalties, and more. He also said Sony doesn’t control the prices and release dates of third-party games unlike competing services.

During the lecture, Eden shared a few Playstation Network statistics for developers to take into consideration:

• There are currently about 2.8 million registered PSN users and 100,000 have joined every week since Christmas.
• Of those registered users, 92% are male and 79% are between 18 and 34.
• Flow, Mortal Kombat 2, Tekken and Warhawk are all included in the top 5 games downloaded for the US and UK. Pain completes the list for the US and Loco Roco fills the remaining slot for the UK.   

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