The cost of developing for the PS4

Polygon recently did a investigation to find out how much it costs for indie developers to create games for the PS4.

They spoke with many different indie developer companies and found out that the PS4 dev kit costs $2,500.

An Xbox One indie developer says that their kit costed a few hundred dollars but Microsoft refrains from telling the public the exact amount. It has been estimated that the PS4 dev kit is $2,000 more than the Xbox One's dev kit.

Even with the price of $2,500, Sony has been lending out the dev kits for free for a year. Currently, there is no PS4 dev kit being sold and Sony has been sending all their good stuff to their most favored developers.

One developer says, "All the indies I know got them for free. Sony has been amazing about kits and development thus far."

Sony seems to not care about collecting the costs -- they'd rather reach more developers by loaning out kits than risk missing out on games because of the kit's cost. Another developer portrays it as, "They are handing them out like candy."

A Sony representative states, "Self-publishing has been available on PlayStation platforms for over five years, so it's nothing new. The process of devs bringing their games to market has continued to evolve, and PlayStation has led the charge in adapting and embracing new publishing rules to allow for more creative freedom for developers."

The representative goes on to say how loaning out the dev kits will be beneficial.

"With self-publishing, we keep things really flexible for developers and give them lots of options, including funding through the Pub Fund, which is back-end funding paid upon completion of the game, we waive patch fees for indies and all digital titles and we embrace new business models like F2P, episodic and subscriptions. We've had more than 500 games self-published on PSN."

There are different types of dev kits at a variety of different price points, but the $2,500 package seems to be the most popular selection of the lot.

Read the rest of this article at PlayStation Gang >