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Laughing Jackal Talks About PlayStation Minis, Says Nice Things

Posted by Ben on July 9th, 2012 | 0 Comments | Tags: Laughing Jackal , Minis

Developer Laughing Jackal recently took to their official web site to put their support behind PlayStation Minis, a platform which has a strangely negative reputation with the gaming community. After recent comments by Velocity developer Futurlab, the creators of Hungry Giraffe and Cubixx have reiterated similar feelings on the platform, with added emphasis on the platform’s support for smaller developers.

Speaking about self publishing on a console, the developer had this to say;

From a technical standpoint Minis have been a great route into self publishing as it has given us the opportunity to learn about the complexities of publishing on console, but in a slightly more relaxed atmosphere. Of course making your games available for people to buy is only one part of self publishing. Being on PlayStation Minis has also given us the opportunity to learn about promotion of our games whilst receiving great marketing support from the platform holder itself.

While it’s possible to drop off the radar soon after release on some platforms, the support from Sony combined with their structuring of updates means that all Minis draw attention in the approach to and upon release. This guarantees us an opportunity to build some serious word of mouth marketing.

Its an interesting point about the platform, the very nature of minis means that Sony is able to promote each of them. Titles by smaller developers that may go unnoticed by the general public are given room on the store to be showcased to PSN users, and indeed as the developer suggests, build word of mouth. Laughing Jackal is also keen to suggest that, through releasing minis, the developer’s relationship with Sony has also gotten stronger, with special mention made to PlayStation Plus, which has gotten games by the developer into far more hands, and as such has increased their notoriety amongst PS+ subscribers.

Ross states that “Minis have also given us the opportunity to have our games published in territories outside of Europe, Australia and New Zealand as we’ve now had games published in both North America & Asia”, which is a huge benefit for smaller developers, and is certainly great to see. Additionally, the success of Laughing Jackal’s minis have allowed the developer to pursue the development of full PS3 titles on PSN, such as Cubixx HD, the wonderful update to the developer’s original minis title. They’re now working on another PS3 title for PSN, called the enigmatic “Mystery Game X”. That probably isn’t the final title.

I’ll leave you with this one last quote from the blog;

Our Minis have also been successful in terms of raw numbers.  At this point in time we are approaching 1 million PSN downloads worldwide.  While at this point we are moving away from Minis with a full PSN title in development (among other things), they are certainly not something we regret getting involved in and have given us a great start as a developer.

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